Performance of Collaboration Activities upon SME's Idiosyncrasy

Recently, SME's Collaboration activities have become one of a vital factor for sustaining competitive edge. This is because of the rapidly changing and competitive market environment, and also to leverage performance by overcoming obstacles of having limited internal resources. Discussing about the effects and relationships of the firm's collaboration activities and its outputs are not new. However, as ICT and various technologies have been diffused into the traditional industries, boundaries and practice capabilities within the industries are becoming ambiguous. Thus contents of the products/services and their development methods are also go and come over the industries. Although many researchers suggested the relations of SME's collaboration activities and innovation performances, most of the previous literatures are focusing on broad perspectives of firm's environmental factors rather than considering various SME's idiosyncrasy factors such as their major product and customer types at once. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze how SME(Small Medium Enterprise)'s external collaboration activities by their idiosyncrasy act as an input to types of innovation performance. In order to analyze collaboration effects in detail, we defined factors that can represent the SME's business environment - Perceived importance of using external resources, Perceived importance of external partnership, Collaboration and Collaboration levels of Major Product types, Customer types and lastly the Firm Sizes. We have also specifically divided the performance of innovation types as product innovation and process innovation based on existing research. In this study, the empirical analysis is based on Probit Regression Model to observe the correlations with the impact of each SME's business environment and their activities. For the empirical data, 497 samples were collected which, this sample data was extracted from the 'Korean Open Innovation Survey' performed by ETRI(Korean Electronics Telecommunications Research Institute) in 2010. As a result, empirical test results indicated that the impact of collaboration varies depend on the innovation types (Product and Process Innovation). The Impact of the collaboration level for the product innovation tend to be more effective when SMEs are developing for a final product, targeting on for individual customers (B2C). But on the other hand, the analysis result of the Process innovation tend to be higher than the product innovation, when SMEs are developing raw materials for their partners or to other firms targeting on for manufacturing industries(B2B). Also perceived importance of using external resources has effected to both product and process innovation performance. But Perceived importance of external partnership was statistically insignificant. Interesting finding was that the service product has negative effects on for the process innovation performance. And Relationship between size of the firms and their external collaboration activities with their performance of the innovations indicated that the bigger firms(over 100 of employees) tend to have better for both product and process innovations. Finally, implications of the results can be suggested as performance of innovation can be varied depends on firm's unique business idiosyncrasy as well as levels of external collaboration activities. The Implication of this research can be considered for firms in selecting an appropriate strategy as well as for policy makers.

중소기업 특성에 따른 외부 협업 활동이 혁신성과에 미치는 영향

최근 급변하고 있는 시장변화로 기업의 경쟁우위를 지속하기 위한 기업 간 협업 활동과 그 중요성이 증가되고 있다. 특히 한정된 자원을 보유한 중소기업의 외부자원 활용과 협업 활동은 기업 내 역량강화 및 혁신성과 창출함 있어 중요한 요소로 자리 잡고 있다. 현재까지의 대다수 선행연구들에서는 중소기업의 다양한 특성과 협업의 연관성을 세부적으로 구분하여 혁신성과를 해석하기보다 기업의 크기(대기업과 중소기업)와 연구개발 활동 등의 환경적 요인으로 구분하여 협업과 성과의 영향정도를 규명하였다. 이에 본 연구에서는 국내 중소기업의 외부 협업 활동과 관련한 기업의 다양한 특성과 혁신성과 유형에 미치는 영향력 정도를 분석하고자 하였다. 이에 기업의 특성을 주 제품이 속한 산업군, 고객군, 기업 규모로 구분하였으며, 각 유형에 따른 협업 활동이 제품혁신과 공정혁신 성과에 미치는 영향력을 살펴보았다. 본 연구에서는 프로빗 모형을 사용하였으며, 분석결과 외부협업은 제품혁신에는 큰 영향을 미치지만 공정혁신에는 유의미한 영향을 미치지 않는 것으로 나타났다. 또한 중소기업의 주 제품군이 속한 산업과 고객에 따른 협업 활동의 경우, 전반적으로 두 유형의 혁신성과에 다양한 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 또한 기업 규모가 큰 경우, 외부와의 협업 활동이 규모가 작은 기업보다 혁신성과에 큰 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구결과를 바탕으로 지속적인 성과창출에 필요한 기업특성에 따른 협업의 영향력을 인지함으로써 향후 소규모 기업들을 위한 혁신성과 창출을 위한 전략을 도입하려는 실무자 및 기관 관계자들에게 도움이 될 것으로 기대된다.