창업 CEO의 특성이 신생기업의 제휴 형성에 미치는 영향: 사회적 네트워크 관점을 바탕으로

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of founder-CEO attributes on the formation of alliance networks in venture startups. Viewing alliance formation as an external resource sourcing mechanism which can help a startup venture overcome the liabilities of newness and smallness, we investigate specific conditions of a founder-CEO under which alliance formation is facilitated. Despite the consensus on the critical role of founder-CEOs, our understanding of how they formulate and implement strategies in startup ventures is limited. Specifically, there is little research on the characteristics of founder-CEOs that may affect the formation of alliances. In this study, we focus on the link between the specific attributes of founder-CEOs of new ventures and the firms’ alliance formation: prior experiences and external visibility. We develop our hypotheses on the effects of total tenure at previous jobs and total number of previous workplaces and large firm experience of a founder-CEO on the formation of alliances. We also investigate the effect of media exposure of a founder- CEO, as a proxy for external visibility, since external visibility promotes reliability and information procurement. Previously, the relationship between media exposure of executives, including founder-CEOs and strategic results of firms has rarely been examined. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications in that exploiting individual network and media exposures of a founder-CEO can be an effective strategy to facilitate successful alliance We test four hypotheses using 406 unbalanced panel data from 116 Korean venture firms listed on KOSDAQ during 1998-2004. The primary data source was Data Analysis Retrieval Transfer System (DART) operated by Financial Supervisory Service. Data were supplemented and confirmed from TS2000P Database and KIS-VALUE. Results from negative binomial regressions show that the alliance formation is likely to increase as a founder-CEO has longer work experiences and more previous jobs before he or she establishes the venture. It is also found that media exposure of a founder-CEO is positively associated with the formation of alliance network. These findings have some important implications. First, individual social networks of a founder-CEO which were built before the founder establishes a new venture can be precious assets for the startup in facilitating alliance formation. Also, founder-CEOs can make efforts to be exposed on media as an effective strategy to promote forming alliances. A contribution of this study is to examine some attributes of founder-CEOs which can facilitate the formation of alliances in social network perspective. Empirically, we believe that this is the first attempt to investigate specific attributes of founder-CEOs which can affect the strategic results such as alliance formation. Especially, study on media exposure of founder-CEOs is valuable attempt for both theoretical and empirical point of view. There has been little research to examine relationship between media exposure of executives and strategic results of firms. This study can provide theoretical and managerial implications on using media exposures as an effective way to draw successful alliance formation.