• Title/Summary/Keyword: Obstacle problems

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International Success the Second Time Around: A Case Study (제이륜국제성공(第二轮国际成功): 일개안례연구(一个案例研究))

  • Colley, Mary Catherine;Gatlin, Brandie
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.20 no.2
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    • pp.173-178
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    • 2010
  • A privately held, third generation family owned company, Boom Technologies, Inc. (BTI), a provider of products and services to the electric utility, telecommunications and contractor markets, continues to make progress in exporting. Although export sales only equaled 5% of total revenue in 2008, BTI has an entire export division. Their export division's Managing Director reveals the trial and errors of a privately held company and their quest for success overseas. From its inception, BTI has always believed its greatest asset is its employees. When export sales struggled due to lack of strategy and direction, BTI hired a Managing Director for its export division. With leadership and guidance from BTI's president and from the Managing Director, they utilized the department's skills and knowledge. Structural changes were made to expand their market presence abroad and increase export sales. As a result, export sales increased four-fold, area managers in new countries were added and distribution networks were successfully cultivated. At times, revenue generation was difficult to determine due to the structure of the company. Therefore, in 1996, the export division was restructured as a limited liability company. This allowed the company to improve the tracking of revenue and expenses. Originally, 80% of BTI's export sales came from two countries; therefore, the initial approach to selling overseas was not reaching their anticipated goals of expanding their foreign market presence. However, changes were made and now the company manages the details of selling to over 80 countries. There were three major export expansion challenges noted by the Managing Director: 1. Product and Shipping - The major obstacle for BTI was product assembly. Originally, the majority of the product was assembled in the United States, which increased shipping and packaging costs. With so many parts specified in the order, many times the order would arrive with parts missing. The missing parts could equate to tens of thousands of dollars. Shipping these missing parts separately in another shipment also cost tens of thousands of dollar, plus a delivery delay time of six to eight weeks; all of which came out of the BTI's pockets. 2. Product Adaptation - Safety and product standards varied widely for each of the 80 countries to which BTI exported. Weights, special licenses, product specification requirements, measurement systems, and truck stability can all differ from country to country and can serve as a type of barrier to entry, making it difficult to adapt products accordingly. Technical and safety standards are barriers that serve as a type of protection for the local industry and can stand in the way of successfully pursuing foreign markets. 3. Marketing Challenges - The importance of distribution creates many challenges for BTI as they attempt to determine how each country prefers to operate with regard to their distribution systems. Some countries have competition from a small competitor that only produces one competing product; whereas BTI manufactures over 100 products. Marketing material is another concern for BTI as they attempt to push marketing costs to the distributors. Adapting the marketing material can be costly in terms of translation and cultural differences. In addition, the size of paper in the United States differs from those in some countries, causing many problems when attempting to copy the same layout and With distribution being one of several challenges for BTI, the company claims their distribution network is one of their competitive advantages, as the location and names of their distributors are not revealed. In addition, BTI rotates two offerings yearly: training to their distributors one year and then the next is a distributor's meeting. With a focus on product and shipping, product adaptation, and marketing challenges, the intricacies of selling overseas takes time and patience. Another competitive advantage noted is BTI's cradle to grave strategy, where they follow the product from sale to its final resting place, whether the truck is leased or purchased new or used. They also offer service and maintenance plans with a detailed cost analysis provided to the company prior to purchasing or leasing the product. Expanding abroad will always create challenges for a company. As the Managing Director stated, "If you don't have patience (in the export business), you better do something else." Knowing how to adapt quickly provides BTI with the skills necessary to adjust to the changing needs of each country and its own unique challenges, allowing them to remain competitive.

Construction of Retrovirus Vector System for the Regulation of Recombinant hTPO Gene Expression (재조합 hTPO 유전자의 발현 조절을 위한 Retrovirus Vector System의 구축)

  • Kwon, Mo-Sun;Koo, Bon-Chul;Kim, Do-Hyang;Kim, Te-Oan
    • Reproductive and Developmental Biology
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    • v.31 no.3
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    • pp.161-167
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    • 2007
  • In this study, we constructed and tested retrovirus vectors designed to express the human thrombopoietin gene under the control of the tetracycline-inducible promoters. To increase the hTPO gene expression at him-on state, WPRE sequence was also introduced into retrovirus vector at downstream region of either the hTPO gene or the sequence encoding reverse tetracycline-controlled transactivator (rtTA). Primary culture cells (PFF, porcine fetal fibroblast; CEF, chicken embryonic fibroblast) infected with the recombinant retrovirus were cultured in the medium supplemented with or without doxycycline for 48hr, and induction efficiency was measured by comparing the hTPO gene expression level using RT-PCR, western blot and ELISA. Higher hPTO expression and tighter expression control were observed from the vector in which the WPRE sequence was placed at downstream of the hTPO (in CEF) or rtTA(in PFF) gene. This resulting tetracycline inducible vector system may be helpful in solving serious physiological disturbance problems which have been a major obstacle in successful production of transgenic animals.

The Records and Archives Administrative Reform in China in 1930s (1930년대 중국 문서당안 행정개혁론의 이해)

  • Lee, Won-Kyu
    • The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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    • no.10
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    • pp.276-322
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    • 2004
  • Historical interest in China in 1930s has been mostly focused on political characteristic of the National Government(國民政府) which was established by the KMT(中國國民黨) as a result of national unification. It is certain that China had a chance to construct a modern country by the establishment of the very unified revolutionary government. But, it was the time of expanding national crises that threatened the existence of the country such as the Manchurian Incident and the Chinese-Japanese War as well as the chaos of the domestic situation, too. So it has a good reason to examine the characteristic and pattern of the response of the political powers of those days. But, as shown in the recent studies, the manifestation method of political power by the revolutionary regime catches our attention through the understanding of internal operating system. Though this writing started from the fact that the Nationalist Government executed the administrative reform which aimed at "administrative efficiency" in the middle of 1930s, but it put stress on the seriousness of the problem and its solution rather than political background or results. "Committee on Administrative Efficiency(行政效率委員會)", the center of administrative reform movement which was established in 1934, examined the plan to execute the reform through legislation by the Executive Council(行政院) on the basis of the results of relevant studies. They claimed that the construction of a modern country should be performed by not political revolution anymore but by gradual improvement and daily reform, and that the operation of the government should become modern, scientific and efficient. There were many fields of administrative reform subjects, but especially, the field of records and archives adminstration(文書檔案行政) was studied intensively from the initial stage because that subject had already been discussed intensively. They recognized that records and archives were the basic tool of work performance and general activity but an inefficient field in spite of many input staff members, and most of all, archival reform bring about less conflicts than the fields of finance, organization and personnel. When it comes to the field of records adminstration, the key subjects that records should be written simply, the process of record treatment should be clear and the delay of that should be prevented were already presented in a records administrative meeting in 1922. That is, the unified law about record management was not established, so each government organization followed a conventional custom or performed independent improvement. It was through the other records administrative workshop of the Nationalist Government in 1933 when the new trend was appeared as the unified system improvement. They decided to unify the format of official records, to use marker and section, to unify the registration of receipt records and dispatch records and to strengthen the examination of records treatment. But, the method of records treatment was not unified yet, so the key point of records administrative reform was to establish a unified and standard record management system for preventing repetition by simplifying the treatment procedure and for intensive treatment by exclusive organizations. From the foundation of the Republic of China to 1930s, there was not big change in the field of archives administration, and archives management methods were prescribed differently even in the same section as well as same department. Therefore, the point at issue was to centralize scattered management systems that were performed in each section, to establish unified standard about filing and retention period allowance and to improve searching system through classification and proper number allowance. Especially, the problem was that each number system and classification system bring about different result due to dual operation of record registration and archives registration, and that strict management through mutual contrast, searching and application are impossible. Besides, various problems such as filing tools, arrangement method, preservation facilities & equipment, lending service and use method were raised also. In the process this study for the system improvement of records and archives management, they recognized that records and archives are the identical thing and reached to create a successive management method of records and archives called "Records and Archives Chain Management Method(文書檔案連鎖法)" as a potential alternative. Several principles that records and archives management should be performed unitedly in each organization by the general record recipient section and the general archives section under the principle of task centralization, a consistent classification system should be used by classification method decided in advance according to organizational constitution and work functions and an identical number system should be used in the process of record management stage and archive management stage by using a card-type register were established. Though, this "Records and Archives Chain Management Method" was developed to the stage of test application in several organizations, but it was not adopted as a regular system and discontinued. That was because the administrative reform of the Nationalist Government was discontinued by the outbreak of the Chinese-Japanese War. Even though the administrative reform in the middle of 1930s didn't produce practical results but merely an experimentation, it was verified that the reform against tradition and custom conducted by the Nationalist Government that aimed for the construction of a modern country was not only a field of politics, but on the other hand, the weak basis of the government operation became the obstacle to the realization of the political power of the revolutionary regime. Though the subject of records and archives administrative reform was postponed to the future, it should be understood that the consciousness of modern records and archives administration and overall studies began through this examination of administrative reform.

Study on the Words Carved on Seongdeokdaewang-Shinjong (Divine Bell of King Seongdeok) with a New Viewpoint (신라성덕대왕신종(新羅聖德大王神鍾)의 명문(銘文) 연구(硏究) -'사상성(思想性)' 탐색을 겸하여-)

  • Choi, Young Sung
    • The Journal of Korean Philosophical History
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    • no.56
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    • pp.9-46
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    • 2018
  • Seongdeokdaewang-Shinjong, the 29th National Treasure, is highly valuable as a study material in various aspects including the histories of ideology, Buddhism, politics, art-craft, Chinese character study, calligraphy, epigraphy and so on of the mid-time of Shinra. Compared with the people's interest in the Shinjong, however, the studies on the words carved on it have not been yet deepened. Such studies have not been yet overcoming the phase of decoding and translation of the words. Today, it is required to analyze and study the words systematically. This article starts with such critical mind. That is why the subtitle of this article is Research on the Background of Thoughts considering that this study must be followed by its 2nd study. This study has totally reviewed the decoding and annotation works that have been done so far. Byeonryeomun (騈儷文: a writing style of Chinese character) has been also studied on its written patterns. As a result, approximately 20 problems have been found and corrected. Especially, such key phrases as '工匠?模' and '日月?暉' have been translated in a new way to spotlight the importance of translation of the carved words. The words carved on the Shinjong are highly valuable to study in the aspect of ideology history. The words fully show not only Buddhist thoughts, Confucian thoughts and Taoist thoughts but also Korea's own unique thoughts, which are all melted in the words without any obstacle to each other. In general, they are highly philosophical words. The words are unique especially in the aspect: They give a meaning to the Shinjong based on the keyword Won-Gong (圓空: circle and empty) and suggest the key point of Buddhist thoughts and governing philosophy altogether. That is, they imply that King Seongdeok's political ideology and governing principle are connected to Pungryudo (風流道), Korea's own unique philosophy. This implication is key evidence that makes it possible to trace the context of transmission of Pungryudo. You should not miss also the phrases implying that there was a big argument between reform group based on Confucian thoughts and conservative group based on Korea's own unique thoughts.

A Study on the Structural Reinforcement of the Modified Caisson Floating Dock (개조된 케이슨 플로팅 도크의 구조 보강에 대한 연구)

  • Kim, Hong-Jo;Seo, Kwang-Cheol;Park, Joo-Shin
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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    • v.27 no.1
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    • pp.172-178
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    • 2021
  • In the ship repair market, interest in maintenance and repair is steadily increasing due to the reinforcement of prevention of environmental pollution caused by ships and the reinforcement of safety standards for ship structures. By reflecting this effect, the number of requests for repairs by foreign shipping companies increases to repair shipbuilders in the Southwest Sea. However, because most of the repair shipbuilders in the southwestern area are small and medium-sized companies, it is difficult to lead to the integrated synergy effect of the repair shipbuilding companies. Moreover, the infrastructure is not integrated; hence, using the infrastructure jointly is a challenge, which acts as an obstacle to the activation of the repair shipbuilding industry. Floating docks are indispensable to operating the repair shipbuilding business; in addition, most of them are operated through renovation/repair after importing aging caisson docks from overseas. However, their service life is more than 30 years; additionally, there is no structure inspection standard. Therefore, it is vulnerable to the safety field. In this study, the finite element analysis program of ANSYS was used to evaluate the structural safety of the modified caisson dock and obtain additional structural reinforcement schemes to solve the derived problems. For the floating docks, there are classification regulations; however, concerning structural strength, the regulations are insufficient, and the applicability is inferior. These insufficient evaluation areas were supplemented through a detailed structural FE-analysis. The reinforcement plan was decided by reinforcing the pontoon deck and reinforcement of the side tank, considering the characteristics of the repair shipyard condition. The final plan was selected to reinforce the side wing tank through the structural analysis of the decision; in addition, the actual structure was fabricated to reflect the reinforcement plan. Our results can be used as reference data for improving the structural strength of similar facilities; we believe that the optimal solution can be found quickly if this method is used during renovation/repair.

A New Approach to Automatic Keyword Generation Using Inverse Vector Space Model (키워드 자동 생성에 대한 새로운 접근법: 역 벡터공간모델을 이용한 키워드 할당 방법)

  • Cho, Won-Chin;Rho, Sang-Kyu;Yun, Ji-Young Agnes;Park, Jin-Soo
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.21 no.1
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    • pp.103-122
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    • 2011
  • Recently, numerous documents have been made available electronically. Internet search engines and digital libraries commonly return query results containing hundreds or even thousands of documents. In this situation, it is virtually impossible for users to examine complete documents to determine whether they might be useful for them. For this reason, some on-line documents are accompanied by a list of keywords specified by the authors in an effort to guide the users by facilitating the filtering process. In this way, a set of keywords is often considered a condensed version of the whole document and therefore plays an important role for document retrieval, Web page retrieval, document clustering, summarization, text mining, and so on. Since many academic journals ask the authors to provide a list of five or six keywords on the first page of an article, keywords are most familiar in the context of journal articles. However, many other types of documents could not benefit from the use of keywords, including Web pages, email messages, news reports, magazine articles, and business papers. Although the potential benefit is large, the implementation itself is the obstacle; manually assigning keywords to all documents is a daunting task, or even impractical in that it is extremely tedious and time-consuming requiring a certain level of domain knowledge. Therefore, it is highly desirable to automate the keyword generation process. There are mainly two approaches to achieving this aim: keyword assignment approach and keyword extraction approach. Both approaches use machine learning methods and require, for training purposes, a set of documents with keywords already attached. In the former approach, there is a given set of vocabulary, and the aim is to match them to the texts. In other words, the keywords assignment approach seeks to select the words from a controlled vocabulary that best describes a document. Although this approach is domain dependent and is not easy to transfer and expand, it can generate implicit keywords that do not appear in a document. On the other hand, in the latter approach, the aim is to extract keywords with respect to their relevance in the text without prior vocabulary. In this approach, automatic keyword generation is treated as a classification task, and keywords are commonly extracted based on supervised learning techniques. Thus, keyword extraction algorithms classify candidate keywords in a document into positive or negative examples. Several systems such as Extractor and Kea were developed using keyword extraction approach. Most indicative words in a document are selected as keywords for that document and as a result, keywords extraction is limited to terms that appear in the document. Therefore, keywords extraction cannot generate implicit keywords that are not included in a document. According to the experiment results of Turney, about 64% to 90% of keywords assigned by the authors can be found in the full text of an article. Inversely, it also means that 10% to 36% of the keywords assigned by the authors do not appear in the article, which cannot be generated through keyword extraction algorithms. Our preliminary experiment result also shows that 37% of keywords assigned by the authors are not included in the full text. This is the reason why we have decided to adopt the keyword assignment approach. In this paper, we propose a new approach for automatic keyword assignment namely IVSM(Inverse Vector Space Model). The model is based on a vector space model. which is a conventional information retrieval model that represents documents and queries by vectors in a multidimensional space. IVSM generates an appropriate keyword set for a specific document by measuring the distance between the document and the keyword sets. The keyword assignment process of IVSM is as follows: (1) calculating the vector length of each keyword set based on each keyword weight; (2) preprocessing and parsing a target document that does not have keywords; (3) calculating the vector length of the target document based on the term frequency; (4) measuring the cosine similarity between each keyword set and the target document; and (5) generating keywords that have high similarity scores. Two keyword generation systems were implemented applying IVSM: IVSM system for Web-based community service and stand-alone IVSM system. Firstly, the IVSM system is implemented in a community service for sharing knowledge and opinions on current trends such as fashion, movies, social problems, and health information. The stand-alone IVSM system is dedicated to generating keywords for academic papers, and, indeed, it has been tested through a number of academic papers including those published by the Korean Association of Shipping and Logistics, the Korea Research Academy of Distribution Information, the Korea Logistics Society, the Korea Logistics Research Association, and the Korea Port Economic Association. We measured the performance of IVSM by the number of matches between the IVSM-generated keywords and the author-assigned keywords. According to our experiment, the precisions of IVSM applied to Web-based community service and academic journals were 0.75 and 0.71, respectively. The performance of both systems is much better than that of baseline systems that generate keywords based on simple probability. Also, IVSM shows comparable performance to Extractor that is a representative system of keyword extraction approach developed by Turney. As electronic documents increase, we expect that IVSM proposed in this paper can be applied to many electronic documents in Web-based community and digital library.

The Policy of Win-Win Growth between Large and Small Enterprises : A South Korean Model (한국형 동반성장 정책의 방향과 과제)

  • Lee, Jang-Woo
    • Korean small business review
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    • v.33 no.4
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    • pp.77-93
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    • 2011
  • Since 2000, the employment rate of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has dwindled while the creation of new jobs and the emergence of healthy SMEs have been stagnant. The fundamental reason for these symptoms is that the economic structure is disadvantageous to SMEs. In particular, the greater gap between SMEs and large enterprises has resulted in polarization, and the resulting imbalance has become the largest obstacle to improving SMEs' competitiveness. For example, the total productivity has continued to drop, and the average productivity of SMEs is now merely 30% of that of large enterprises, and the average wage of SMEs' employees is only 53% of that of large enterprises. Along with polarization, rapid industrialization has also caused anti-enterprise consensus, the collapse of the middle class, hostility towards establishments, and other aftereffects. The general consensus is that unless these problems are solved, South Korea will not become an advanced country. Especially, South Korea is now facing issues that need urgent measures, such as the decline of its economic growth, the worsening distribution of profits, and the increased external volatility. Recognizing such negative trends, the MB administration proposed a win-win growth policy and recently introduced a new national value called "ecosystemic development." As the terms in such policy agenda are similar, however, the conceptual differences among such terms must first be fully understood. Therefore, in this study, the concepts of win-win growth policy and ecosystemic development, and the need for them, were surveyed, and their differences from and similarities with other policy concepts like win-win cooperation and symbiotic development were examined. Based on the results of the survey and examination, the study introduced a South Korean model of win-win growth, targeting the promotion of a sound balance between large enterprises and SMEs and an innovative ecosystem, and finally, proposing future policy tasks. Win-win growth is not an academic term but a policy term. Thus, it is less advisable to give a theoretical definition of it than to understand its concept based on its objective and method as a policy. The core of the MB administration's win-win growth policy is the creation of a partnership between key economic subjects such as large enterprises and SMEs based on each subject's differentiated capacity, and such economic subjects' joint promotion of growth opportunities. Its objective is to contribute to the establishment of an advanced capitalistic system by securing the sustainability of the South Korean economy. Such win-win growth policy includes three core concepts. The first concept, ecosystem, is that win-win growth should be understood from the viewpoint of an industrial ecosystem and should be pursued by overcoming the issues of specific enterprises. An enterprise is not an independent entity but a social entity, meaning it exists in relationship with the society (Drucker, 2011). The second concept, balance, points to the fact that an effort should be made to establish a systemic and social infrastructure for a healthy balance in the industry. The social system and infrastructure should be established in such a way as to create a balance between short- term needs and long-term sustainability, between freedom and responsibility, and between profitability and social obligations. Finally, the third concept is the behavioral change of economic entities. The win-win growth policy is not merely about simple transactional relationships or determining reasonable prices but more about the need for a behavior change on the part of economic entities, without which the objectives of the policy cannot be achieved. Various advanced countries have developed different win-win growth models based on their respective cultures and economic-development stages. Japan, whose culture is characterized by a relatively high level of group-centered trust, has developed a productivity improvement model based on such culture, whereas the U.S., which has a highly developed system of market capitalism, has developed a system that instigates or promotes market-oriented technological innovation. Unlike Japan or the U.S., Europe, a late starter, has not fully developed a trust-based culture or market capitalism and thus often uses a policy-led model based on which the government leads the improvement of productivity and promotes technological innovation. By modeling successful cases from these advanced countries, South Korea can establish its unique win-win growth system. For this, it needs to determine the method and tasks that suit its circumstances by examining the prerequisites for its success as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each advanced country. This paper proposes a South Korean model of win-win growth, whose objective is to upgrade the country's low-trust-level-based industrial structure, in which large enterprises and SMEs depend only on independent survival strategies, to a high-trust-level-based social ecosystem, in which large enterprises and SMEs develop a cooperative relationship as partners. Based on this objective, the model proposes the establishment of a sound balance of systems and infrastructure between large enterprises and SMEs, and to form a crenovative social ecosystem. The South Korean model of win-win growth consists of three axes: utilization of the South Koreans' potential, which creates community-oriented energy; fusion-style improvement of various control and self-regulated systems for establishing a high-trust-level-oriented social infrastructure; and behavioral change on the part of enterprises in terms of putting an end to their unfair business activities and promoting future-oriented cooperative relationships. This system will establish a dynamic industrial ecosystem that will generate creative energy and will thus contribute to the realization of a sustainable economy in the 21st century. The South Korean model of win-win growth should pursue community-based self-regulation, which promotes the power of efficiency and competition that is fundamentally being pursued by capitalism while at the same time seeking the value of society and community. Already existing in Korea's traditional roots, such objectives have become the bases of the Shinbaram culture, characterized by the South Koreans' spontaneity, creativity, and optimism. In the process of a community's gradual improvement of its rules and procedures, the trust among the community members increases, and the "social capital" that guarantees the successful control of shared resources can be established (Ostrom, 2010). This basic ideal can help reduce the gap between large enterprises and SMEs, alleviating the South Koreans' victim mentality in the face of competition and the open-door policy, and creating crenovative corporate competitiveness. The win-win growth policy emerged for the purpose of addressing the polarization and imbalance structure resulting from the evolution of 21st-century capitalism. It simultaneously pursues efficiency and fairness on one hand and economic and community values on the other, and aims to foster efficient interaction between the market and the government. This policy, however, is also evolving. The win-win growth policy can be considered an extension of the win-win cooperation that the past 'Participatory Government' promoted at the enterprise management level to the level of systems and culture. Also, the ecosystemic development agendum that has recently emerged is a further extension that has been presented as a national ideal of "a new development model that promotes the co-advancement of environmental conservation, growth, economic development, social integration, and national and individual development."