• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.141-156
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• 2023

The advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), along with the expansion of government and private investment in startup discovery and funding, has led to the emergence of startups seeking to generate outstanding results based on innovative ideas. As successful startups serve as role models, the number of aspiring entrepreneurs preparing to launch their own startups continues to increase. However, unlike entrepreneurs who challenge themselves with serial entrepreneurship after experiencing success, early-stage startups face various challenges such as team building, technology development, and fundraising. Accelerators play a dual role of mentor and investor by providing education, mentoring, consulting, network connection, and initial investment activities to help startups overcome various challenges they face and facilitate their growth. This study investigated whether there is a correlation between the characteristics of startups and their entrepreneurial performance, and analyzed whether accelerators mediate the relationship between startup characteristics and entrepreneurial performance. A total of 11 hypotheses were proposed, and a survey was conducted on 302 startup founders and employees located across the country, including the metropolitan area, for empirical research. SPSS 23.0 and Amos 23.0 were used for statistical analysis. Through this study, it was found that factors such as innovation, organizational culture, financial characteristics, and learning orientation among the characteristics of startups, rather than having a direct impact on entrepreneurial performance, are linked to entrepreneurial performance through the role of accelerators. By analyzing the impact factors of startup characteristics on entrepreneurial performance, this study presents research on the role of accelerators and provides institutional improvements. It is expected to contribute to the expansion of investment and differentiated acceleration programs, enabling startups to seize the market and grow stably in the market.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.33-46
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• 2019

Even though Korea is strengthening the support for startups due to the limitations of growth policies focusing on large companies, the survival rate of startups is very low, so that there should be more efforts to increase the survival rate of startups. As the existing startup support institutions have provided only fragmentary supports to startups, it would be necessary to have the comprehensive support institutions. As an alternative, the accelerator providing the comprehensive support such as spatial support, education, mentoring, networking, seed investment, and connection for follow-up investment to the initial startups was legalized in Korea of 2016, based on the registration system. Currently, within less than two year from then, there have been much interest in it enough to have about 136 registered accelerators. In the United States, the accelerator was introduced more than ten years ago. In Korea, however, it is still in the initial stage, so that the researches or social consensus on the accelerator are not sufficient. Thus, this study aims to suggest the measures for the development of accelerator and the consensus on the decision making for the selection of accelerator of startups, by researching which parts are considered when startups in the accelerator stage select the accelerator. As a result of the empirical analysis, the factor that has the greatest influence on decision making factors when startup chooses an accelerator was the subsequent investment attraction. This can be explained to the accelerator as desired, considering the factor that the startup of the initial stage places the most importance on growth as investment. We hope that these research results will be sustainable in future research related to accelerators, in hopes that it will be useful for establishing accelerator policies for domestic startups and direction for revitalizing related industries.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.13-35
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• 2020

Startup accelerators are a new type of investors providing a certain amount of shares for imparting education, mentoring, networking, and providing space and seed money that can directly resolve the difficulties faced by nascent entrepreneurs (Clarysse, 2016). Startup accelerators have expanded worldwide as their influence over the startup ecosystem has increasingly been established (Pauwels et al., 2016; Cohen & Hochberg, 2014). This study was conducted to derive investment determinants of startup accelerators that are emerging as major investment players around the world. To this end, the accelerator-type determinants of investment were derived. As previous research on this topic is nonexistent, this process involved qualitative meta-synthesis, literature reviews, observation, and in-depth interviews. First, more than 30 research papers were examined for the determinants of investment for firms at an early stage of their foundation, and the categories and determinants of investment in the relevant studies were comparatively analyzed using qualitative meta-synthesis. Further, related data were investigated to identify the characteristics of accelerators, and the startup evaluation process of US accelerators was studied. The more than 100 questions raised during this process were coded to examine the determinants of investment that accelerators considered important. In-depth interviews were conducted with four US accelerators to identify the characteristics of accelerators and key determinants of investment. Ultimately, 5 categories of accelerator-type determinants of investment and 26 subordinate determinants of investment were derived. The results were verified and supplemented by consulting with seven accelerators in Korea. The results were confirmed after pilot tests and verification by seven domestic accelerators. After confirming the accelerator-type determinants, the reliability of them was verified by examining the importance and priority of each category through the quantitative survey of Korean accelerators. The research that elicited the accelerator-type investment determinants is the first research and is expected to be a major reference to the progress of subsequent studies. This research that systematically derived the investment determinants of the accelerator is expected to make major contributions to the progress of follow-up studies, the process of selecting startups, and the investment decision-making process of the accelerators.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.95-114
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• 2020

This paper, a meta-analysis of the effect of the start-up support policy on the start-up performance was conducted to examine the effect of the start-up support policy on the start-up performance of beneficiary companies and to provide theoretical and practical implications to support organizations and practitioners. To this end, 35 papers containing the correlation coefficient, which is a positive statistical value, were selected from the previous studies in academic journals and dissertations published in Korea from 2007 to 2020. In the preceding study of the start-up support policy, the independent variables include funding, education support, facility/equipment support, network support, mentoring support, consulting support, marketing support, management support, technical support, manpower support, and finance as a dependent variable. The effect size of the impact on aptitude and non-financial performance was reviewed. The pattern of the effect size was presented as a forest plot for easy visual understanding, and outliers were verified through sensitivity analysis for small-study-effect data with publication convenience. As a result of analyzing the effect size of the government-supported policy, it was verified that the effect size was generally medium or higher, affecting the entrepreneurial performance. Among the independent variables, the factor that has the greatest effect on startup performance is manpower support, followed by technical support, marketing support, management support, facility/equipment support, education support, mentoring support, funding, network support, and consulting support. It was analyzed that the effect size was large in order. As the 「Small and Medium Business Startup Support Act」 was recently reorganized from the manufacturing industry to digital transformation and smartization on October 8, 2020, the start-up support policy should consider the start-up stage and verify the priorities to organize the budget.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.27-42
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• 2020

Startup accelerators have emerged as new investment entities that help early startups, which are not easy to survive continuously due to lack of funds, commercialization capabilities, and experiences. As their positive performance on early startups and the ecosystem has been proven, the number of early startups which want to receive their investment is also increasing. However, they are vaguely preparing to attract accelerators' investment because they do not have any information on what factors the accelerators consider important. In addition, researches on startup accelerators are also at an early level, so there are no remarkable prior studies on factors that decide on investment. Therefore, this study aims to help startups prepare for investment attraction by looking at what factors are important for accelerators to invest, and to provide meaningful implications to academia. In the preceding study, we derived five upper level categories, 26 lower level accelerators' investment determinants through the qualitative meta-synthesis method, secondary data analysis, observation on US accelerators and in-depth interviews. In this study, we want to derive important implications by deriving priorities of the accelerators' investment determinants. Therefore, we used AHP that are evaluated as the suitable methodology for deriving importance and priority. The analysis results show that accelerators value market-related factors most. This means that startups that are subject to investment by accelerators are early-stage startups, and many companies have not fully developed their products or services. Therefore, market-related factors that can be evaluated objectively seem to be more important than products (or services) that are still ambiguous. Next, it was found that the factors related to the internal workforce of startups are more important. Since accelerators want to develop their businesses together with start-ups and team members through mentoring, ease of collaboration with them is very important, which seems to be important. The overall priority analysis results of the 26 investment determinants show that 'customer needs' and 'founders and team members' understanding of customers and markets' (0.62) are important and high priority factors. The results also show that startup accelerators consider the customer-centered perspective very important. And among the factors related to startups, the most prominent factor was the founder's openness and execution ability. Therefore, it can be confirmed that accelerators consider the ease of collaboration with these startups very important.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.165-175
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• 2024

In this paper, the purpose of this study was to analyze various information related to the government's youth entrepreneurship support policy, propose a customized entrepreneurship promotion strategy for college students majoring in sports, and increase their entrepreneurship efficacy. Through this, the aim was to increase the entrepreneurship efficacy of sports majors. Firstly, a literature study was conducted, and secondly, alternatives for promoting entrepreneurship among college students majoring in sports were analyzed based on expert interviews. Therefore, the following suggestions were made. 1. Recognizing the added value and individuality of the sports field in startup policy. 2. Creation of a start-up network and platform for sports majors to start a business. 3. Sports start-up space composition. 4. Organizing and supporting start-up clubs. 5. Activating entrepreneurship education and competitions in capstone design and employment seminar subjects. 6. Increasing start-up efficacy through start-up mentoring.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1097-1103
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to arrange a plan for which humanities digital contents can be directly utilized in modern people's life through a convergent approach between humanities and ICT. It inquired into a plan for developing and applying contents, which are made contents in the aspect of cartoon and animation, by excavating contents available for advancing to start-up in Greater China based on the Chinese cultural content archetype. Also, the aim is to offer the integrated start-up DB and child-care mentoring program for advancing to greater China that supports the development in specific ICT start-up item, through a research on smart-phone APP publishing environment based on ICT and a research on mobile big-data ecological environment.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.185-201
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• 2016

Korean universities has promoted the entrepreneurship education. University entrepreneurship education has three methods(entrepreneurship lecture, startup events, and institutional supports). This study examined that university entrepreneurship education has how to affect students entrepreneurial intentions. For the empirical investigation of the hypotheses of this study, surveys have been carried out 100 university students who are studying entrepreneurship education in Gangneung area during september 2016. The results of the empirical analysis are as follows : First, venturing space has a significant impact to entrepreneurial intention. Second, entrepreneurship lecture, start-up events, and mentoring does not affect entrepreneurial intention. As a result of this study, university students in Gangneung proved that entrepreneurship lecture, start-up events and mentoring did not affect the entrepreneurship intention. On the contrary, venturing space has a significant impact to entrepreneurship intention. This results suggest that improve entrepreneurial intention of university students needs practical assistance for start-up. This study has limitations have the generalization. The results are limited to Gangneung area, if this study has increase sample surveys or magnify area, it is possible to have produce different results.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.117-128
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• 2018

Various government support policies are being promoted in order to stimulate growth of SMEs. The government is striving to provide effective support through direct methods of tax, finance and indirect methods through support programs. However, the view on the government's startup policy is still tense. We are sympathetic with the need for support, but discussions continue to be made on the effectiveness of support projects and support projects. Therefore, this study evaluates the importance and satisfaction of the government start-up support project. For this purpose, we conducted questionnaires on ICT start-ups who have experienced government start-up support projects. Of these, 128 were analyzed for GAP analysis and ISA. As a result of the GAP analysis of the government start - up support project, the degree of satisfaction (4.408) was lower than the degree of importance (5.221), confirming that the beneficiary's evaluation on the start-up support project was negative. As a result of the importance-satisfaction analysis, 'R&D' and 'commercialization' are located in the maintenance area, and 'government funding', 'marketing, overseas advancement' projects are included in the concentrated area. In the low-ranking areas, there are 'entrepreneur events and networks' items. Finally, there are 'facilities and spaces', 'mentoring and consulting', and 'entrepreneurship education' in the surplus areas. As a result of multiple regression analysis, it was found that 'R&D', 'entrepreneurial education', and 'government funding' influenced satisfaction. Based on the results of this study, it is expected that it will contribute to improving the quality level of the government start-up support project by establishing the support policy for the ICT start-up enterprises and improving the system.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.115-128
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• 2022

This research aims to analyze of the Effect of Army Start-up Support Program (hereinafter, ASSP) on the level of discharged or scheduled to be discharged soldier's satisfaction of their military service. In addition, this paper also seeks to elaborate on how those Army-supported programs, such as Start-up competitions, mentoring, camp, and school, can increase the level of military service satisfaction. By participating in those programs, service members can leverage their time in the military to make opportunity for their future career rather than consider it as a career break, increasing their military service satisfaction. Finally, on the basis of findings, this paper advocates for expanding Service Members startup Support Program of government agencies and municipalities and enhancing younger population's individual capabilities through ASSP. This research used ASSPs, such as Army Start-up competitions, mentoring, camp, and school, as independent variables. For controlled variables, this paper takes demographic elements such as status and career path of the participants. Our empirical analysis reveals that ASSP has a direct impact on the military service satisfaction, supported by the statistics from the hierarchical regression analysis. However, the research also suggests that individual' military service satisfaction from ASSP may differ from one another in accordance with the controlled variables such as status and career of the participants. This paper proves that ASSP can play a substantial role in enhancing service members' capabilities during their time in military and that Army fosters talent and connects itself to the nation and society. In addition, this research could contribute to increasing employment rate of and expanding Start-up support program of government agencies and municipalities for younger population by providing empirical results which advocates the latter's necessity.