This research aims to empirically examine the characteristics and conditions of the youth start-up in South Korea. The results show that the rate of successful students transition to start-up is only 1.3%; this indicates that various start-up programs which are often provided by the central or local governments and universities are not as effective as they were initially expected.
Statistics show that the educational services is the most popular industry of youth start-up, and the start-ups by women were over-represented in some of the industrial sectors. Meanwhile, only one third of the survey respondents were properly prepared for their start-ups, and the average preparation period was only approximately 5 months. This result implies that, in terms of period and planning, the preparation of the youth start-up is not given as much effort as searching for a job.
The respondents also answered that neither government's assistant programs nor the courses offered by institutions or universities were helpful for establishing the start-up business, which prompts the necessity to re-evaluate the effectiveness of start-up supporting programs.