• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.116-126
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• 2019

South Korea is known for its major manufacturing capabilities in semi-conductor, automobile, and IT industries. However, little is known about the competitive capabilities of South Korea's textile industry. The present study presents information about how Korean textile firms build their competitive capabilities on multiple fronts. Through a case study of two businesses operating in the South Korean textile and apparel industry, this paper illustrates a series of competitiveness enhancing initiatives, starting with the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID). The main contribution of this article is the focus on how the interdisciplinary nature of the textile and apparel industry can benefit from and optimize the use of Information Technology through sustained efforts on multiple fronts. This study suggests that Korean textile firms approach their competitive capabilities in terms of strategic direction, innovative priorities, and operational focus. In the competitive global business environment, this could be the solution for the textile and apparel industry, by helping for the survival in the upcoming information age. Specifically, by adopting RFID-based SCM, firms can gain a competitive capability that promises sustainable growth in the future.

• Clinical and Experimental Vaccine Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2023

Widespread public vaccination is one of the effective mechanisms to ensure the health and prevent deaths in societies. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine is a stark instance in this regard. Vaccine development is a complex process requiring firm-level capabilities, various infrastructures, long-term planning, and stable and efficient policies. Due to the global demand for vaccines during the pandemic, the national capability to produce vaccines is critical. To this end, the current paper investigates influential factors, at the firm- and policylevel, in the COVID-19 vaccine development process in Iran. By adopting a qualitative research method and conducting 17 semi-structured interviews and analyzing policy documents, news, and reports, we extracted internal and external factors affecting the success and failure of a vaccine development project. We also discuss the characteristics of the vaccine ecosystem and the gradual maturity of policies. This paper draws lessons for vaccine development in developing countries at both firm and policy levels.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.3-10
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• 2013

This paper aims to present the model of engineering design education workshop for appropriate technologies. Since 2008 Handong Innovation Center for Engineering Education and a Non-Profit Organization, Sharing and Technology, held engineering design workshop during every summer break. We present the contents of the workshop and analyze the educational effects of the program. The workshop is entitled "Engineering Design Academy for the other 90%" because we take it serious that most of the research and development efforts of the science and technologies in the world is just focused on the rich people while the other 90% people in the world are unreachable from the benefits of the modern technologies. By the workshop we tries to provide the college students the perspectives on the worldwide poverty problems and to encourage them to serve the 3rd world people in need through their specialties in the field of engineering profession. The evaluation results by participants are very positive. Especially, we began invite the 3rd world people to the workshop as design problem clients from 2010 summer workshop. The evaluation from them are also very positive. The analysis results on the educational effects of the workshop show that the workshop improves the students skills required by the ABEEK (Acreditation Board of Engineering Education of Korea) including not only design capability but also team work, communication skill, understanding the social impacts of engineering design, engineering ethics, and globalization.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.213-235
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• 2008

Recent reports about economic structure and changes show that global economy changes to rely on service rather than manufacturing. This phenomenon can be explained in two ways: the growth of service industry itself and the increasing reliance on service by other industry areas. The importance of service is indicated by the fact that the contribution of research and development, marketing, and finance to the revenue generation of companies is getting greater than that of manufacturing. This change in the economic structure calls for researchers' attention on the importance of service and the service-based economy. In the service-based economy, firms are considered value proposition providers and consumers actual value creators so that the concept of co-value creation becomes a key thesis to study. However, there are a variety of definitions of service and diversified measurements of service anchored in the supplier-oriented understanding of service yet. This lack of understanding of the service and the economic paradigm change causes a lot of problems in the areas of service productivity, service quality, and service innovation. Even though a new movement called service science started and rigorously pursues the way of enhancing the understanding of the economic change and service productivity, there is no framework that provides a unified view about the new role of service, service productivity, service quality, and thus service innovation. This study proposes a unified framework to provide a structured view about service provision and to facilitate the research on service. The framework is built on the concepts from previous studies about service marketing and service science: service life cycle and service networks including value activity network, resource integrator network, and capability network. We hope this study can be used as the basis for future studies on service science.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.481-491
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• 2018

As the global business environment is dynamic, uncertain, and complex, supply chain management determines the performance of the supply chain in terms of the utilization of resources and capabilities of companies involved in the supply chain. Companies pursuing open innovation gain greater access to the external environment and accumulate knowledge flows and learning experiences, and may generate better business performance from dynamic capabilities. This study analyzed the effects of supply chain dynamic capabilities, open innovation, and supply uncertainty on supply chain performance. Through questionnaires on 178 companies listed on KOSDAQ, empirical results are as follows: First, integration and reactivity capabilities among supply chain dynamic capabilities have a positive effect on supply chain performance. Second, the moderating effect of open innovation showed a negative correlation in the case of information exchange, and a positive correlation in the cases of integration, cooperation and reactivity. Third, two of the 3-way interaction terms, "information exchange*open innovation*supply uncertainty" and "integration*open innovation*supply uncertainty" were statistically significant. The implications of this study are as follows: First, as the supply chain needs to achieve optimization of the whole process between supply chain components rather than individual companies, dynamic capabilities play an important role in improving performance. Second, for KOSDAQ companies featuring limited capital resources, open innovation that integrates external knowledge is valuable. In order to increase synergistic effects, it is necessary to develop dynamic capabilities accordingly. Third, since resources are constrained, managers must determine the type or level of capabilities and open innovation in accordance with supply uncertainty. Since this study has limitations in analyzing survey data, it is necessary to collect secondary data or longitudinal data. It is also necessary to further analyze the internal and external factors that have a significant impact on supply chain performance.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.1063-1082
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• 2018

The concept of SDN (Software Defined Networking) endows the network with programmability and significantly improves the flexibility and extensibility of networks. Currently a plenty of research works on introducing SDN into wireless networks. Most of them focus on the innovation of the SDN based architectures but few consider how to realize the global perception of the network through the controller. In order to address this problem, a software defined carrier grade Wi-Fi framework called SWAN, is proposed firstly. Then based on the proposed SWAN architecture, a blueprint of introducing the traditional NSA (Network Situation Awareness) into SWAN is proposed and described in detail. Through perceiving various network data by a decentralized architecture and making comprehension and prediction on the perceived data, the proposed blueprint endows the controllers with the capability to aware of the current network situation and predict the near future situation. Meanwhile, the extensibility of the proposed blueprint makes it a universal solution for software defined wireless networks SDWNs rather than just for one case. Then we further research one typical use case of proposed NSA blueprint: network performance awareness (NPA). The subsequent comparison with other methods and result analysis not only well prove the effectiveness of proposed NPA but further provide a strong proof of the feasibility of proposed NSA blueprint.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.485-500
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• 2023

Machine learning-based structural health monitoring (ML-based SHM) methods are researched extensively in the recent decade due to the availability of advanced information and sensing technology. ML methods are well-known for their pattern recognition capability for complex problems. However, the main obstacle of ML-based SHM is that it often requires pre-collected historical data for model training. In most actual scenarios, damage presence can be detected using the unsupervised learning method through anomaly detection, but to further identify the damage types would require prior knowledge or historical events as references. This creates the cold-start problem, especially for new and unobserved structures. Modal-based methods identify damages based on the changes in the structural global properties but often require dense measurements for accurate results. Therefore, a two-stage hybrid modal-machine learning damage detection scheme is proposed. The first stage detects damage presence using Principal Component Analysis-Frequency Response Function (PCA-FRF) in an unsupervised manner, whereas the second stage further identifies the damage. To solve the cold-start problem, mode shape assessment using the first mode is initiated when no trained model is available yet in the second stage. The damage identified by the modal-based method would be stored for future training. This work highlights the performance of the scheme in alleviating the cold-start issue as it transitions through different phases, starting from zero damage sample available. Results showed that single and multiple damages can be identified at an acceptable accuracy level even when training samples are limited.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.165-188
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• 2010

Recently public and finance SI (system integration) industry is called as 4D (difficult, dangerous, dirty, dreamless) industry because of low profit, overtime works and poor motivation of employees. Even some people think at SI industry to be a labor intensive industry instead of a high technology industry. The current study considers outside environmental change of SI industry as well as inside capability enhancement of SI companies. The study adopted action research method with the author's expertise and experiences as a head of a major SI company in Korea. The current research framework suggests 5 areas of profitability enhancement that offers propositions and implications. 5 areas of profitability enhancement are (1) policy improvement, (2) business portfolio innovation (3) sales capability reinforcement, (4) delivery capability reinforcement, and (5) cost management innovation. The five areas include 11 propositional factors and 21 implementation plans which were chosen from the profitability perspectives of SI companies.In order to successfully execute propositions and implementation plans of the framework, 3 years is needed and after 3 years profitability are expected to increase 10% higher than the current level. The framework, propositions and suggestions in this study are expected to offer a real contribution for SI companies that want to enhance competitiveness and profitability. Future extension of the current study to benchmarking the competitiveness and profitability between local companies and global companieswill bring a solid attention from industry and academics.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.95-128
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• 2018

Since mid and late 2000s, the smartphones has been widely diffused and Korea ranked first in global smartphone market in 2011 thanks to its rapid adoption of Android operating system, technology capability accumulated in featurephone development, vertical integration on smartphone production and premium positioning. However, Korea fell behind because of the rise of another latecomer, China, in four years (2015) after it recorded the top position globally. How did the leadership change occurred in the smartphone industry so rapidly? In order to answer the question, we investigated three favorable windows of opportunity for the rise of China, which are technological, demand, and institutional, and the strategic responses of Chinese firms as well as the rigidity and complacency with the past success of Korean firms. Our findings contribute to the extension of 'catch-up cycle' theory as well as provide in-depth insights for strategies and policies settings to overcome the recent rise of China in information and communication technology sector for Korea.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.799-821
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• 2016

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are essential systems for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations in current battlespace. And its importance will be getting extended because of complexity and uncertainty of battlespace. In this study, we forecast the advancement of 96 UAVs during the period of 32 years from 1982 to 2014 using TFDEA. TFDEA is a quantitative technology forecasting method which is characterized as non-parametric and non-statistical mathematical programming. Inman et al. (2006) showed that TFDEA is more accurate in forecasting compared with classical econometrics (e.g. regression). This study got 4.06% point of annual technological rate of change (RoC) for UAVs by applying TFDEA. And most UAVs in the period are inefficient according to the global SOA frontiers. That is because the countries which develop UAVs are in the middle class of technological level, so more than 60% of world UAVs markets are shared by North America and Europe which are advanced countries in terms of technological maturity level. This study could give some insights for UAVs development and its advancement. And also can be used for evaluating the adequacy of Required Operational Capability (ROC) of suggested future systems and managing the progress of Research and Development (R&D).