• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to find out which factors determine the success of start-up in the initial market and what are the most important determinants. For the empirical analysis, the questionnaire related to the analysis of success factors for start-up success was designed according to the quantitative analysis (AHP technique). First, we selected 8 representative success factors for successful start-up in the initial market. In order to determine the degree of priority among these factors, we surveyed 12 entrepreneurs who are interested in entrepreneurship, universities, research institutes, and public officials. As a result of the empirical analysis, 51% of the funds in the tier 1 were ranked as the top priority to determine success factors. Followed by research and development (32.5%), management (8.7%) and marketing (7.8%). In particular, when each of the four items is calculated as 100 according to the result of the tier 1, and the tier 2 is converted, the foreign investment is analyzed as 43.7%. It was followed by 15.14% of R & D facilities, 14.07% of ideas, 8.7% of managerial ability, 7.29% of domestic investment, 5.85% of buyer feedback, 3.3% of development strategy and 1.95% of marketing strategy. Among the eight success factors, overseas investment items showed the closest preference to half, and it was the most important variable that determines the success or failure of market entry. The implication of this study is that many start-ups in Korea expect to receive investment and support from overseas accelerators. This means that overseas investment itself has been recognized as a start-up that makes services and products that can be used in the global market. A high preference for attracting foreign investment is due to the fact that the amount of investment is larger than that of Korea and that it can flexibly cope with the pressure on the performance compared to domestic investors. In this study, it was meaningful that we could confirm this fact through questionnaires of start-up experts. In future research, we need to find a viable alternative through studying how to provide start-up to foreign direct investment at the national level.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2018

Japan's manufacturing is mostly dependent on the automotive industry in Toyota-Kariya cities. However, the nearby city of Hamamatsu is the home of a start-up ecosystem known as Japan's Silicon Valley. How is it possible to evaluate the innovative potential of each regional industry? What kind of guidelines exist for continuing R&D investment when companies' net incomes are negative in the face of the 'Valley-of-Death' or financial crisis? Is it possible to measure the regional resilience ability in the context of the financial crisis? Entrepreneurial innovation is defined as a real-option portfolio consisting of investment decision to commercialize R&D findings. The subcontractor system implies a vertical and tight industrial group. However, a start-up ecosystem means a platform for horizontal and flexible partnership. In this research, the data include the financial indices of each of 18 public companies in both regions between FY2009 and FY2017. The objective of this paper is to clarify the call option or resilience function of equity for R&D investment in the context of the financial crisis in both regions by using Bayesian MCMC analysis.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.283-307
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• 2019

Although crowdfunding has emerged as a promising route to fundraising success, little is known about the specifics of equity-based crowdfunding. Using a data set of 1,111 start-ups with investment funding totaling over $4.67 billion, we analyzed the association between a start-up's underlying characteristics and its funding outcome. We found that a start-up's funding outcome is positively associated with its human capital, but negatively associated with earlier investors' business experience. Furthermore, our analyses revealed that investors have higher levels of social capital are a noise signal to later investors. These findings shed light on the critical role of human capital, investors' experience, and social capital as credible signals for start-up investment in equity crowdfunding.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.135-152
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• 2019

Recently there are many development and support policies for start-up companies because of successful venture companies related to ICT services. However, as these policies have focused on the support for the initial stage of start-up, many start-up companies have difficulties to continuously grow up. The main reason for these difficulties is that they recognize start-up tasks as independent activities. However, many experts or related articles say that start-up tasks are composed of related processes from the initial stage to the stable stage of start-up firms. In this study, we models the start-up processes based on the survey collected by the start-up companies, and analyze the start-up process of ICT service companies with process mining techniques. Through process mining analysis, we can draw a sequential flow of tasks for start-ups and the characteristics of them. The analysis of start-up businessman, idea derivation, creating business model, business diversification processes are resulted as important processes, but marketing activity and managing investment funds are not. This result means that marketing activity and managing investment funds are activities that need ongoing attention. Moreover, we can find temporal and complementary tasks which could not be captured by independent individual-level activity analysis. Our process analysis results are expected to be used in simulation-based web-intelligent system to support start-up business, and more cumulated start-up business cases will be helpful to give more detailed individual-level personalization service. And our proposed process model and analyzing results can be used to solve many difficulties for start-up companies.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.47-65
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• 2020

With the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in sight, innovative business models utilizing new technologies are emerging, and startups are enjoying an abundance of opportunities based on the agility to respond to disruptive innovations and the opening to new technologies. However, what is most important in creating a sustainable start-up ecosystem is not the start-up itself, but the process of research-start-investment-investment-the leap to listing and big business-in order to build a virtuous circle of startups that leads to re-investment. To this end, the environment created in the hub area where start-ups were conducted is important, and these material and non-material environmental factors are described as being inclusive by the word "entrepreneurial ecosystem." This study aims to provide implications for Korea's entrepreneurial ecosystem through the study of the interaction of the elements that make up the start-up ecosystem and the relationship of ecosystem participants in Singapore. Singapore has been consistently mentioned as the top two Asian countries in assessing the start-up environment and business environment. In this process, six elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem presented by Isenberg(2010)-policies, finance, culture, support, human resources, and market-are the best frameworks for analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems in terms of well encompassing prior studies related to entrepreneurial ecosystem elements, and a model of regional transformation is formed focusing on some elements to suit Singapore, the target area of study. By considering that Singapore's political nature would inevitably have a huge impact on finance, Smart Nation policy was having an impact on university education related to entrepreneurship, and that the entrepreneurial networks and global connectivity formed within Singapore's start-up infrastructure had a significant impact on Singapore's start-up's performance, researches needed to look more at the factors of policy, culture and market. In addition, qualitative research of participants in the entrepreneurial ecosystem was essential to understand the internal interaction of the elements of the start-up ecosystem, so the semi-structured survey was conducted by visiting the site. As such, this study examined the status of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem based on qualitative research focused on policies, culture and market elements of Singapore's start-up ecosystem, and intended to provide implications for regulations related to start-ups, the role of universities and start-up infrastructure through comparison with Korea. This could contribute not only to the future research of the start-up ecosystem, but also to the creation of a start-up infrastructure, boosting the start-up ecosystem, and the establishment of the orientation of the start-up education in universities.

• Korean small business review
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.173-209
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• 2021

Start-up accelerators are a new type of investor that provide mentoring, education and seed capital to start-ups for a fixed duration and receive a certain stake in them in return. They help start-ups achieve successful commercialization. With increase in performance visibility, the number of private and public sector accelerators rose across domestic and international markets. Private sector accelerators are established and operated by private entities while public sector accelerators are established and operated by the government. Both play complementary roles that are becoming increasingly important to start-ups. Therefore, this study aims to examine the differences in major operational goals and investment determinants between private and public sectors and to understand their implications. The results show that the private sector prioritizes profit generation through the investment, while the public sector aims to contribute to the development of high-growth start-ups, and create region-specific and technology-specific start-up ecosystems. Additionally, both groups consider customer needs the most important determinant. Public groups are more conservative in investments and tend to place importance on objective indicators such as patents, partners, mentors, and co-founders. Conversely, private groups value the capabilities of founders and their ease of collaboration with accelerators. These findings can help start-ups get support from public or private accelerators more easily. It will also help public and private accelerators refine the criteria for selecting start-ups.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.570-579
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• 2021

Compared to men, women experience difficulties in fund-raising, which can be a fundamental impediment to the success of women entrepreneurs. In this study, we examine whether is a difference between genders in the initial funding performance of start-up companies and confirm whether there are differences in organizational factors and entrepreneur factors that affect the initial funding performance. Data were collected through a survey of technology-based start-up companies located in the metropolitan area, and 287 companies were used for hypothesis analysis. The results reveal that there was a significant difference between genders in the investment attraction performance of early-stage entrepreneurs. In addition, as a result of the split-group regression analysis, it was found that in the case of men, firm age, early firm size, starting capital, engineering major had a significant effect on men. However, in the case of the women's group, it was confirmed that all the variables related to the organizational factors and entrepreneur factors were not significant. This study indirectly suggests that prejudices such as gender role stereotypes actually affect economic activities related to investment attraction activities.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.75-96
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• 2018

Recently, the government has been pursuing various policies to create new industries and jobs through the invigoration of start-ups. For the sustained growth of start-ups, it is necessary to look not only at the supply of risk capital but also at policies for venture capital firms that nurture and foster start-ups. The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of the nurturing and fostering role of risk capital, such as mentorship on the performance of start-ups, and to do this we analyzed the effects, as a newly introduced form of venture capital, of mentoring by an accelerator and investor ties on the performance outcomes of start-ups. We find that mentoring and investor ties for start-up enterprises positively influence follow-up investment in start-ups. In addition, this study finds that with a younger CEO of a start-up, it is more likely that the performance of the start-up will improve. Meanwhile, when examining increases in employment as a measure of the business performance of start-ups, mentoring and investor ties are found to have a positive effect on the increase of employment at start-ups. These results suggest that there is a need to promote policies that strengthen the mentoring role of venture capital in Korea's equity finance policies and in the government's SME support policies.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.113-124
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• 2019

With the decline in the college student population and the increase in the youth unemployment rate, the university began to be interested in starting a business. Under the initiative of the government, the start-up support project was reflected in the university's educational programs, which led to the university students receiving various start-up support benefits. In response to the expansion of entrepreneurship education, various entrepreneurship education programs and support programs were applied in line with the government's efforts to start college students. As a result, students' entrepreneurial competence and willingness to start up increased. College student entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are increasing. The increase of university student start-up companies is taking place in the entrepreneurial education environment within the university, and the support of university, community, and start-up support institutions for university student start-up, the starting point of the start-up ecosystem, is paying off. It can be seen that the youth entrepreneurship ecosystem based on university entrepreneurship education is in place. The university supports the entire business process from idea development, such as start-up classes, start-up club support, patent application support, prototype development support, and investment linkage. However, there is a university that develops and operates a unique program for each school and a university that does not. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an education program that can produce efficient results. The purpose of this study is to support the start-up program of the university to be the consumer-centered start-up support.

• East Asian Journal of Business Economics (EAJBE)
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.21-25
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• 2015

Investment process on startup companies faces several difficulties based on the characteristics of this type of companies, such as lack of historical data, current operating losses and absence of comparable companies. In this paper we focus in a new methodology based on ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators. OWA operators are useful instruments that enable the aggregation of information; in other words, from a data set we are able to obtain a single representative value of that set. The investment methodology presented consists on the application of OWA operators to the targeted startup companies based on the capacity of cash-flow generation and also on the planned scenario of future growth for each company. This paper shows that the methodology proposed can serve as a valuable tool, complementing the qualitative criteria (which, obviously, should not be ignored) for assessing and selecting a start-up investment.