• International Journal of Quality Innovation
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.127-135
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• 2001

Personnel engaged in the medical field have implemented continual improvement by team activities in an effort to construct a system that reduces the risks involved in medical care. Knowledge in total quality management (TQM), especially statistical quality control (SQC) developed for industry, seems to be applicable to medical care. This paper describes the application of SQC to continual improvement in medical care.

• International Journal of Quality Innovation
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.38-45
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• 2002

Continuous quality improvement is now the focus of research and application in quality engineering. To achieve continuous improvement, it's necessary to integrate quality tools and to plan, design and control the whole process of creating quality. Based on the extensive literature review and the philosophy of concurrent quality engineering, the paper analyzes the relationships among major quality tools such as QFD, FMEA, DOE and SPC and presents a basic model and structure for the integration of quality tools.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.65-82
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• 2017

This study is to examine the effects of high commitment HRM on service performance in the service industry, and to examine the mediating effect of the organizational internal innovation direction. Specifically, the direction of internal innovation consists of high-value-added HR and service and cost-reduction downsizing. We assumed that the high-value-added direction of HR and service will have a positive mediating effect. And assumed that cost-reduction downsizing direction has negative mediating effect. The data were collected from 2013 workplace panel survey(WPS) of the Korea Labor Institute(KLI). Among the 1,775 companies, 896 companies classified as wholesale and retail, transportation, professional scientific services, education services, health social services, financial services, and other services (such as information society support services) were extracted and used. In summary, high-commitment HRM has a positively significant effect on the direction of high value-added innovation of HR and services, and has a negatively significant effect on the cost-reduction downsizing direction. In addition, the direction of high value-added innovation of HR and service was positive effect on service performance, and cost-reduction downsizing innovation direction has a negative effect on service performance. And the direct effect of high commitment HRM on service performance has not been confirmed. However, we confirmed the positive mediating effect of high value-added innovation direction of HR and services, and confirmed that the negative mediating effect of cost-reduction downsizing. Therefore, it is confirmed that the two variables have a full mediating effect on the relationship between high commitment HRM and service performance.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.274-281
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• 2015

Firms are becoming increasingly dependent on external resources for a competitive advantage in environmental turbulence, the requisite speed of organizational change. Therefore, they focused on an 'Open Innovation'. This study examined the relationships among entrepreneurial orientation, learning orientation, open innovation, and new product development. The results provide broad support for the following: (1) entrepreneurial orientation and learning orientation strongly drive open innovation, (2) open innovation has a significant effect on new product development, and (3) learning orientation has a positive effect on open innovation and new product development. These results provide unique insight into how firms develop new product through open innovation. This study also addresses the implications of these results and the possible limitations of the research.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.767-787
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• 2018

Technology-driven innovation and job-creation has each been the subject of much scholarly attention, but have largely been considered separately rather than in conjunction with each other. While the previous literature on economics pinpointed the macro effects on industry-level, this study explores the micro-level comparisons on innovation sources over the employment and financial performances. The PSM (propensity-score matching) analysis presents that firms, involved in an inward technology, tend to have higher employees with dominant technology capabilities than in-house R&D firms. The in-house R&D firms, on the contrary, have superior financial performances, suggesting that external technology commercialized firms suffer from low transformative efficiency. The mediation test analysis corroborates that the external technology-driven innovation induces more human resources in internalizing the exogenous technology. The positive relationship between R&D innovation and employment allow verification of the government's intervention in the promotion of technology commercialization in public sector. On the other hand, it also signals that the policy needs to enhance the recipient firms' commercializing capacity rather than a 'one-hit' transaction.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of company characteristics and individual characteristics perceived by employees of small businesses on job satisfaction and especially to seek activation of the organization by extending from previous studies to examine the intermediary role of company innovation and applying management measures focusing on the environment of changing global society where CEOs of small businesses cause job satisfaction of organizational members and present the direction for the improvement of management and institutional development. This study was carried out for about 2 months targeting employees of small businesses and the results of empirical analysis are as follows: First, company characteristics and individual characteristics perceived by employees of small businesses turned out to have a positive (+)effect on job satisfaction but the hypothesis that job stress affects job satisfaction was not significant. Second, of the effects of company characteristics and individual characteristics perceived by employees of small businesses on company innovation, organization flexibility and CEO's leadership, company communication and degree of cooperation between departments, individuals, challenge of individuals perceived individual characteristics were found to affect company innovation but the hypothesis that job stress affects it was not significant. Third, company innovation was found to have a positive (+)effect on job satisfaction and fourth, in the intermediary effect verification of company innovation between company characteristics and individual characteristics perceived by employees and job satisfaction, organization flexibility and communication, collaboration turned out to perform partial intermediation and CEO's leadership to perform full intermediation and individual challenge performance to perform full intermediation and the intermediary effect of job stress was not proven. These results are company characteristics and individual characteristics that is the perception of the independent variables in SME employees is not only a direct relationship with job satisfaction, suggesting that also has an indirect effect is mediated depending on the innovation of the company. Therefore, it can be seen that even for the innovation performance of enterprises is important to increase the job satisfaction of employees of SMEs. In particular, the conductivity of the leadership and individual parameters so completely over the innovativeness of the company is the result of job satisfaction itgetda can be said that the innovation efforts of the organization is effective at the same time be pursued.

• The Journal of Small Business Innovation
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1-17
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to suggest an efficient way for ventures to achieve innovation performance through R&D cooperative arrangements. Achieving innovation is one of the critical factors for the survival of ventures. Unlike established firms, ventures often do not have the specialized assets necessary to take technological developments to the product and market stages. Young and resource-constrained firms can achieve innovation by finding and accessing to the complementary resources from R&D cooperation. In the current business environment, many firms are likely to engage in multiple simultaneous R&D cooperations with different partners. Recent research stream addresses the importance of efficient cooperation management from the holistic portfolio perspective. Since maintaining the multiple cooperative relations require substantial amount of time and effort, managing cooperative relationships play a more important role to resource-constrained firms. In order to find an efficient composition of R&D cooperative partners, we mainly focus on the diversity of partner type and dependence level in partnership. We analyze the data on Korean manufacturing ventures collected in the Korean Innovation Survey (KIS) which was conducted by the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI). The KIS questionnaire assesses the existence of cooperative relationships with different types of partners respectively. The types of cooperating partners are affiliated companies, suppliers, clients & customers, competitors or other firms in the same industry, consulting firms, universities, and research institutes. We confirm that ventures obtain relatively higher benefits from R&D cooperation compared with established firms in terms of innovation performance. The results show that a moderate level of diversity in cooperative partner type composition increases innovation. Moreover, diversity of cooperation dependency among the partners enhances innovation performance. Likewise, concentrating on the quality aspects of cooperative composition, such as diversity of partners and degree of dependencies, this study offers some implications for ventures in managing partners from an integrative perspective.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.133-146
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• 2013

While the use of internet is routine nowadays, users receive and share information through a variety of media. Through the use of internet, information delivery media is diversifying from traditional media of one-way communication, such as newspaper, TV, and radio, into media of two-way communication. In contrast of traditional media, blogs enable individuals to directly upload and share news, which can be considered to have a differential speed of information diffusion than news media that convey information unilaterally. Therefore this Study focused on the difference between online news and social media blogs. Moreover, there are variations in the speed of information diffusion because that information closely related to one person boosts communications between individuals. We believe that users' standard of evaluation would change based on the types of information. As well, the speed of information diffusion would change based on the level of proximity. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the differences in information diffusion based on the types of media. And then information is segmentalized and an examination is done to see how information diffusion differentiates based on the types of information. This study used the Bass diffusion model, which has been frequently used because this model has higher explanatory power than other models by explaining diffusion of market through innovation effect and imitation effect. Also this model has been applied a lot in other information diffusion related studies. The Bass diffusion model includes an innovation effect and an imitation effect. Innovation effect measures the early-stage impact, while the imitation effect measures the impact of word of mouth at the later stage. According to Mahajan et al. (2000), Innovation effect is emphasized by usefulness and ease-of-use, as well Imitation effect is emphasized by subjective norm and word-of-mouth. Also, according to Lee et al. (2011), Innovation effect is emphasized by mass communication. According to Moore and Benbasat (1996), Innovation effect is emphasized by relative advantage. Because Imitation effect is adopted by within-group influences and Innovation effects is adopted by product's or service's innovation. Therefore, ours study compared online news and social media blogs to examine the differences between media. We also choose different types of information including entertainment related information "Psy Gentelman", Current affair news "Earthquake in Sichuan, China", and product related information "Galaxy S4" in order to examine the variations on information diffusion. We considered that users' information proximity alters based on the types of information. Hence, we chose the three types of information mentioned above, which have different level of proximity from users' standpoint, in order to examine the flow of information diffusion. The first conclusion of this study is that different media has similar effect on information diffusion, even the types of media of information provider are different. Information diffusion has only been distinguished by a disparity between proximity of information. Second, information diffusions differ based on types of information. From the standpoint of users, product and entertainment related information has high imitation effect because of word of mouth. On the other hand, imitation effect dominates innovation effect on Current affair news. From the results of this study, the flow changes of information diffusion is examined and be applied to practical use. This study has some limitations, and those limitations would be able to provide opportunities and suggestions for future research. Presenting the difference of Information diffusion according to media and proximity has difficulties for generalization of theory due to small sample size. Therefore, if further studies adopt to a request for an increase of sample size and media diversity, difference of the information diffusion according to media type and information proximity could be understood more detailed.

• BMB Reports
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.178-183
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• 2015

Dendritic cells play an important role in determining whether na${\ddot{i}}$ve T cells mature into either Th1 or Th2 cells. We determined whether heat-shock protein X (HspX) purified from Mycobacterium tuberculosis regulates the Th1/Th2 immune response in an ovalbumin (OVA)-induced murine model of asthma. HspX increased interferon-gamma, IL-17A, -12 and transforming growth factor (TGF)-${\beta}$ production and T-bet gene expression but reduced IL-13 production and GATA-3 gene expression. HspX also inhibited asthmatic reactions as demonstrated by an increase in the number of eosinophils in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, inflammatory cell infiltration in lung tissues, airway luminal narrowing, and airway hyper-responsiveness. Furthermore, HspX enhanced OVA-induced decrease of regulatory T cells in the mediastinal lymph nodes. This study provides evidence that HspX plays critical roles in the amelioration of asthmatic inflammation in mice. These findings provide new insights into the immunotherapeutic role of HspX with respect to its effects on a murine model of asthma.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.99-124
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• 2012

Our society has long been talking about necessity for innovation. Since companies in particular need to carry out business innovation in their overall processes, they have attempted to apply many innovation factors on sites and become to pay more attention to their innovation. In order to achieve this goal, companies has applied various information technologies (IT) on sites as a means of innovation, and consequently IT have been greatly developed. It is natural for the field of IT to have faced another revolution which is called cloud computing, which is expected to result in innovative changes in software application via the Internet, data storing, the use of devices, and their operations. As a vehicle of innovation, cloud computing is expected to lead the changes and advancement of our society and the business world. Although many scholars have researched on a variety of topics regarding the innovation via IT, few studies have dealt with the issue of could computing as IT. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to set the variables of innovation attributes based on the previous articles as the characteristic variables and clarify how these variables affect "Performance Expectancy" of companies and the intention of using cloud computing. The result from the analysis of data collected in this study is as follows. The study utilized a research model developed on the innovation diffusion theory to identify influences on the adaptation and spreading IT for cloud computing services. Second, this study summarized the characteristics of cloud computing services as a new concept that introduces innovation at its early stage of adaptation for companies. Third, a theoretical model is provided that relates to the future innovation by suggesting variables for innovation characteristics to adopt cloud computing services. Finally, this study identified the factors affecting expectation and the intention to use the cloud computing service for the companies that consider adopting the cloud computing service. As the parameter and dependent variable respectively, the study deploys the independent variables that are aligned with the characteristics of the cloud computing services based on the innovation diffusion model, and utilizes the expectation for performance and Intention to Use based on the UTAUT theory. Independent variables for the research model include Relative Advantage, Complexity, Compatibility, Cost Saving, Trialability, and Observability. In addition, 'Acceptance for Adaptation' is applied as an adjustment variable to verify the influences on the expected performances from the cloud computing service. The validity of the research model was secured by performing factor analysis and reliability analysis. After confirmatory factor analysis is conducted using AMOS 7.0, the 20 hypotheses are verified through the analysis of the structural equation model, accepting 12 hypotheses among 20. For example, Relative Advantage turned out to have the positive effect both on Individual Performance and on Strategic Performance from the verification of hypothesis, while it showed meaningful correlation to affect Intention to Use directly. This indicates that many articles on the diffusion related Relative Advantage as the most important factor to predict the rate to accept innovation. From the viewpoint of the influence on Performance Expectancy among Compatibility and Cost Saving, Compatibility has the positive effect on both Individual Performance and on Strategic Performance, while it showed meaningful correlation with Intention to Use. However, the topic of the cloud computing service has become a strategic issue for adoption in companies, Cost Saving turns out to affect Individual Performance without a significant influence on Intention to Use. This indicates that companies expect practical performances such as time and cost saving and financial improvements through the adoption of the cloud computing service in the environment of the budget squeezing from the global economic crisis from 2008. Likewise, this positively affects the strategic performance in companies. In terms of effects, Trialability is proved to give no effects on Performance Expectancy. This indicates that the participants of the survey are willing to afford the risk from the high uncertainty caused by innovation, because they positively pursue information about new ideas as innovators and early adopter. In addition, they believe it is unnecessary to test the cloud computing service before the adoption, because there are various types of the cloud computing service. However, Observability positively affected both Individual Performance and Strategic Performance. It also showed meaningful correlation with Intention to Use. From the analysis of the direct effects on Intention to Use by innovative characteristics for the cloud computing service except the parameters, the innovative characteristics for the cloud computing service showed the positive influence on Relative Advantage, Compatibility and Observability while Complexity, Cost saving and the likelihood for the attempt did not affect Intention to Use. While the practical verification that was believed to be the most important factor on Performance Expectancy by characteristics for cloud computing service, Relative Advantage, Compatibility and Observability showed significant correlation with the various causes and effect analysis. Cost Saving showed a significant relation with Strategic Performance in companies, which indicates that the cost to build and operate IT is the burden of the management. Thus, the cloud computing service reflected the expectation as an alternative to reduce the investment and operational cost for IT infrastructure due to the recent economic crisis. The cloud computing service is not pervasive in the business world, but it is rapidly spreading all over the world, because of its inherited merits and benefits. Moreover, results of this research regarding the diffusion innovation are more or less different from those of the existing articles. This seems to be caused by the fact that the cloud computing service has a strong innovative factor that results in a new paradigm shift while most IT that are based on the theory of innovation diffusion are limited to companies and organizations. In addition, the participants in this study are believed to play an important role as innovators and early adapters to introduce the cloud computing service and to have competency to afford higher uncertainty for innovation. In conclusion, the introduction of the cloud computing service is a critical issue in the business world.