한국 중소기업의 혁신활동 결정요인

Abstract

Understanding key drivers for firm's innovation is crucial to facilitate related activities within the company, and thus boosts that company's performance. It is obvious that collective innovation activities of all companies finally improve the industrial standing of that country. Due to this substantial impact of corporate innovations, many researches have been conducted to identify the determinants of innovation activities, but most of such conventional researches are largely relying on the survey of questionnaires, which show some limitations on considering the effects of qualitative factors such as CEO's knowledge level on technology, corporate technicians’degree of proficiency. And furthermore, there are large discrepancies in firms’self-assessment as to what they consider to be an innovation activity and what they consider to be R&D spending, specifically related to the expertise of those filling out the survey. Self-assessment of innovations often leads to a different judgement about what innovation is compared to the perception of other stake holders, which is empirically supported by several studies. In this study, authors examine the determinants of firm's innovative activities while considering such qualitative factors together with the traditional determinants using dataset from KOTEC(Korea Technology Finance Corporation). The technology rating system of KOTEC classifies and reports these kinds of data together with firm's innovation activities. KOTEC's qualitative data are created by industry experts while assessing the amount of financing for that firm, and accumulated within KOTEC's database together with the other quantitative data. Multiple regression analysis shows that CEO's level of knowledge on technology, tech-employee's proficiency, firm age, firm size, net profit and export are significant factors regarding innovative activities in manufacturing firms. In case of KIS(Knowledge Intensive Service) firms, their age and size are identified as significant factors for innovative activities and this study also shows that there are significant differences in the determinants of innovative activities between the manufacturing firms and KIS firms, and a wider study including qualitative factors is needed to better understand the nature of innovative activities.