The Korean government has made fostering a “creative economy” a top priority. The goal is to shift Korea's economic paradigm to one based on innovation in which new start-ups and venture businesses play a key role. However, the venture capital market is still at an early stage of...

A creative economy requires innovation-friendly conditions. Korea’s innovation system should be improved by upgrading universities and expanding their role in business R&D, while increasing international collaboration in R&D from its current low level. The returns from Korea’s large...

Firms launch formal programs to identify promising employee ideas and to provide support for their commercialization. This paper examines an alternative role of the firm's internal screening process in employee turnover. I argue that because the firm has better information vis-à-vis the market...

Making SMEs and start-ups a driver of growth and job creation requires a number of policies to improve the performance of SMEs, whose labour productivity in the manufacturing sector has fallen to less than a third of that in large companies. The large-scale support for SMEs should shift from...

This note describes a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, called Crunchbase, with a focus on its potential for economic and managerial research. Crunchbase is rapidly being discovered by scholars from different fields. It has notably already informed studies on specific sectors...

We analyze determinants of access to venture capital for Black founders of high-growth startups. We combine image- and name-processing algorithms with clerical review to identify race for over 100,000 startup founders "at risk" for venture funding. Black founders raise roughly one-third as much...

From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...