• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.79-95
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• 2013

New product innovation is a process of embodying new knowledge in a product and technology licensing is getting popular as a means to innovations and introduction of new product to the market in today's competitive global market environment. Incumbents often rely on technology licensing to access new product opportunities created by other firms. Prior research has examined various aspects of technology licensing agreements such as specific contract terms of licensing agreements, e.g., distribution of control rights, exclusivity of licensing agreements, cross-licensing, and the scope of licensing agreements. This study aims to provide answers to an important, but under-researched question: why do some incumbents initiate more licensing agreement for exploratory learning while others do it for exploitative learning along the innovation process? We attempt to extend our knowledge of licensing agreements from an organizational learning perspective. Technology licensing as a specific form of interfirm linkages can be initiated with different learning objectives along the process of new product innovation. The exploratory stages of the innovation process such as discovery or research stages involve extensive searches to create new knowledge or capabilities, whereas the exploitative stages of the innovation process such as application or test stages near the commercialization are more focused on developing specific applications or improving their efficiency or reliability. Thus, different stages of the innovation process generate different types of learning and the resulting technological resources. We examine when incumbents as licensees initiate more licensing agreements for exploratory learning objectives and when more for exploitative learning objectives, focusing on two factors that may influence a firm's formation of exploratory and exploitative licensing agreements: 1) its past radical and incremental innovation experience and 2) its internal investments in R&D and marketing. We develop and test our hypotheses regarding the relationship between a firm's radical and incremental new product experience, R&D investment intensity and marketing investment intensity, and the likelihood of engaging in exploratory and exploitive licensing agreements. Using data collected from various secondary sources (Recap database, Compustat database, and FDA website), we analyzed technology licensing agreements initiated in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries from 1988 to 2011. The results of this study show that incumbents initiate exploratory rather than exploitative licensing agreements when they have more radical innovation experience and when they invest in R&D activities more intensively; in contrast, they initiate exploitative rather than exploratory licensing agreements when they have more incremental innovation experience and when they invest in marketing activities more intensively. The findings of this study contribute to the licensing and interfirm cooperation studies. First, this study lays a foundation to understand the organizational learning aspect of technology licensing agreements. Second, this study sheds lights on how a firm's internal investments in R&D and marketing are linked to its tendency to initiate licensing agreements along the innovation process. Finally, the findings of this study provide important insight to managers regarding which technologies to gain via licensing agreements. This study suggests that firms need to consider their internal investments in R&D and marketing as well as their past innovation experiences when they initiate licensing agreements along the process of new product innovation.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.301-312
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to propose strategies for enhancing competitiveness through the utilization of policy funds, especially in the start-up companies supported by the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund. And then, the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund should develop 'user-centered policy funding model' in order to increase start-up's utilization of policy fund and support start-ups that are supported in the long run. The competitiveness of domestic start-up companies has been strengthened by 'user-centered policy funding model' and new innovations have been introduced through 'Living Lab', an open innovation. But, in order to overcome the limitation of reaching the stage of commercialization, the 'user-centered policy funding model' proposed in this study enables start-ups to be the subject of actual policy funding, and also allows users to freely apply for necessary funding at any time. Therefore, the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund has a significance in suggesting 'user-centered policy funding model' as a support model to be customized. However, since SMEs recognize the actual situation and limit acceptance of all the difficulties, the systematic analysis of the actual situation of the policy funds of the start-up by the credit guarantee fund and the related support institutions for the scientific approach of the user-oriented policy funding model need.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.95-105
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• 2013

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.