The Influence of Entrepreneurial Competences on Corporate Performance of Technology-based Start-ups

Abstract

Many countries around the world are pursuing various support policies to foster start-ups national widely in order to secure new economic growth engines in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The South Korean government announced the diffusion strategy for the 2’nd round Start-up Boom in March 2019 and is promoting the support policies for start-up incubating by various programs. Many incubators and startup accelerators operate various kinds of programs to foster start-ups using government financial supports. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of entrepreneurship and technical capability of entrepreneurs as the internal factors of the technology-based start-ups and the effects of programs supported by the government as an external factor on the corporate performance of a start-up company, and the mediating effects of core competence of start-ups were analyzed using SPSS and AMOS. The results show that the entrepreneurship, technical capability and the programs supported by incubators or accelerators had no direct effects on the corporate performance of a start-up, but the core competence of the company had complete mediating effects. In addition, the type of program supported by the comprehensive accelerator programs or the marketing supports had effects on the core competence rather than simple financial supports. Lastly, the policy proposals for incubating program support and future research directions along with the limitation are suggested.