Leveraging Corporate Assets and Talent to Attract Investors in Japan: A Country with an Innovation System Centered on Large Companies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I found the subject of the paper very interesting. However, there are a number of questions that should be clarified:

- The abstract of the paper should include the method used.

- The introduction should justify the structure of the article.

- Justify the methodology applied and the advantages over other possible methods.

- The paper discusses the valuation of start-ups, but does not clarify the model used by the databases to determine the value.

 

I hope the comments will be useful, best regards.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript for review deals with the issue of startups’ fundraising in Japan that has a large-firm driven national innovation system. More specifically, it examined whether corporate spin-off firms or startups led based on large-firm experiences raise larger funds in Japan.

 

It is a very interesting study which deal with startup funding in the context of Japan where startup activities are not very active. This study is valuable as it highlights how new ventures are created and scales up in the country, and also it provides some implications for countries with a large-firm driven innovation systems to get ready for new technological paradigms.

 

One thing that I would have pointed out was about the measurement of a dependent variable. The author used “total funding amount”. I think total funding amount varies according to the stage of startup funding. There are stages such as pre-seed, seed stages, and a number of series of funding. As a companies fundrasing history matures, the amount of funding increases. I would have pointed out this problem, but I found that the author used “age” variable, and already specified this problem in the conclusion part.

 

Despite some weaknesses, I recommend this manuscript to be published in the journal.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf