Institutional Factors Affecting Faculty Startups and Their Performance in Korea: A Panel Data Analysis

This paper adopts a resource-based approach to analyze why some universities have a greater number of faculty startups, and how this impacts on performance, in terms of indictors such as the number of employees and revenue sales. More specifically, we propose 9 hypotheses which link institutional resources to faculty startups and their performance, and compare 5 different groups of university resources for cross-college variation, using data from 134 South Korean four-year universities from 2017 to 2020. We find that the institutional factors impacting on performance of faculty startups differ from other categories of startups. The results show that it is important for universities to provide a more favorable environment, incorporating more flexible personnel policies and accompanying startup support infrastructure, for faculty startups, whilest it is more effective to have more financial resources and intellectual property for other categories of startups. Our findings also indicate that university technology-holding company and technology transfer programs are crucial to increase the number of faculty startups and their performance. Our analysis results have implications for both university and government policy-makers, endeavoring to facilitate higher particaption of professors in startup formation and ultimate commercialization of associated teachnologies.