• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.13-28
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• 2017

Entrepreneurship is an important factor not only for start-ups, but also for scale-up of businesses. In other words, the two aspects of establishment and growth of businesses must be balanced through entrepreneurship. However, it is true that entrepreneurship has been biased toward the former in previous researches and government policies. Here in this research, the causal relationships between the entrepreneurial characteristics of Korean firms and the performance of the company, which is measured by proposal, activity, and business performance are examined as a growth perspective. Based on these relationships, a model describing the operating mechanism of corporate entrepreneurship is derived and policy implications are provided. In conducting research, the hypotheses on the interrelationship of variables are builded using '2016 Entrepreneurship Situation Survey(Corporate)' data from Korea Entrepreneurship Foundation and analyzed by structural equation modeling. In addition, the moderating effect according to the firm size and the mediating effect between entrepreneurship and business performance are analyzed. As a result of this research, the fact that entrepreneurship affects business performance is identified and it is necessary to prioritize corporate vision and strategy for enhancement of entrepreneurship. In particular, necessity of operating system for SMEs is confirmed considering SMEs' entrepreneurship level. The implications of this research are expected to be applied by the government in establishing policy direction to enhance corporate entrepreneurship of SMEs in the future.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.61-72
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• 2017

Although small and medium-size enterprises are facing the significant trends in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Open Innovation which are increasingly in need, the subjects of absorptive capacity and entrepreneurship has not been studied sufficiently in order to enhance the competitiveness of SMEs' products and cope with the current trend. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of absorptive capacity of SMEs on product competitiveness and the moderating role of CEO's entrepreneurship between the absorptive capacity and the product competitiveness. The data were collected from 313 employees of 22 SMEs in the Seoul metropolitan area, Kyunggi-do and Chung-cheong province, and analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis. As a result of the hypothesis test, both the absorptive capacity of SMEs and CEO's entrepreneurship had a positive effect on the product competitiveness. In addition, also found out the innovativeness and the proactivness out of the three entrepreneurship had the moderate roles between the potential absorptive capacity out of the absorptive capacity and the product competitiveness. On the other hand, the risk-taking out of the three entrepreneurship had the moderate roles between the realized absorptive capacity out of the two absorptive capacity and the product competitiveness. These results suggest that open innovation and technological entrepreneurship are needed to help SMEs learn external resources and information to create performance. After discussing this conclusions and implications of the study, the direction for future study was presented.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.156-166
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• 2019

For this study, a survey was conducted with the employees of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) located in Seoul and in Gyeonggi province. In the end, a total of 328 valid questionnaires were received and used in the analysis. The data of this study were analyzed using two statistics programs: SPSS Statistics 22.0 and AMOS 22.0. As for the method to verify the hypothesis, we used a structural equation model. The key findings of this study are as follows. First, the results of correlation analysis between management strategy factors, innovation activities, and business performance showed that the factors that were at a higher level of correlation were the technology differentiation strategies, marketing differentiation strategies, and the cost-driven strategy. Second, the strategic management factors that influenced innovation activities were in the following order: marketing differentiation, technology differentiation, and the cost-driven strategy, while the valid factors that affected business performance with significance were only the marketing differentiation strategy and the cost-driven strategy. Third, while the analysis showed that the technology differentiation strategy did not have a direct effect on business performance, it was shown that the relationship between the technology differentiation strategy and business performance was completely mediated by innovation activities.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.55-80
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• 2019

Recently, many companies improving their management performance by building a powerful brand value which is recognized for trademark rights. However, as growing up the size of online commerce market, the infringement of trademark rights is increasing. According to various studies and reports, cases of foreign and domestic companies infringing on their trademark rights are increased. As the manpower and the cost required for the protection of trademark are enormous, small and medium enterprises(SMEs) could not conduct preliminary investigations to protect their trademark rights. Besides, due to the trademark image search service does not exist, many domestic companies have a problem that investigating huge amounts of trademarks manually when conducting preliminary investigations to protect their rights of trademark. Therefore, we develop an intelligent similar trademark search model to reduce the manpower and cost for preliminary investigation. To measure the performance of the model which is developed in this study, test data selected by intellectual property experts was used, and the performance of ResNet V1 101 was the highest. The significance of this study is as follows. The experimental results empirically demonstrate that the image classification algorithm shows high performance not only object recognition but also image retrieval. Since the model that developed in this study was learned through actual trademark image data, it is expected that it can be applied in the real industrial environment.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.217-232
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• 2019

As the role of entrepreneurship has become more important for continuous business growth in a rapidly changing economic environment, numerous studies dealing with entrepreneurship are taking place. However, recent studies has concentrated mainly on business-oriented entrepreneurship which emphasizes corporate efficiency only. While in the era of fourth industrial revolution human resources are more important than corporate efficiency, the existing literature is largely focused on traditional entrepreneurship. Research on humane entrepreneurship has not been rigorous, and there are few studies involving small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in particular. The purpose of this study is to fill in this void by investigating the effect of humane entrepreneurship on core competencies of SMEs and the effect of these core competencies on corporate performance. To examine SMEs core competencies and their performance from the perspective of humane entrepreneurship, this study set up traditional entrepreneurship and humane entrepreneurship as variables, and develop research model based on these variables. This study tests 5 different hypothesis using this model. A survey was conducted among CEOs and executives at SMEs in Seoul and Gyeonggido, South Korea from, June 26 to August 1, 2018. A total of 310 questionnaires were analyzed. The results show that both traditional and human entrepreneurship have a positive effect on the core competencies of SMEs, which are core competency factors, and that core competencies positively affect both non-financial performance and financial performance. Moreover, non-financial performance is found to have positive effect on financial performance. Given these findings, this study suggests that humane entrepreneurship is critical to SMEs and their performance, no less than traditional entrepreneurship. This study provides profound implications of necessity of raising humane entrepreneurship in environment of companies.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.248-258
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• 2021

The study analyzed the financial determinants of corporate R&D intensity that require more attention from academics and practitioners in the Korean capital market. Domestic small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may face with developing substitutes by making more R&D investments in scale and scope, given the unprecedented economic conditions such as the limitation of importing core components and materials from other nation(s). KOSDAQ-listed SMEs were selected as sample data, whose R&D expenditures may be less than those of large firms during the post-global financial turmoil period (2010~2018). Static panel data model was applied, along with Tobit and stepwise regression models, for examining the validity of results. Logit, probit, and complementary log-log regressions were also employed for a relative analysis. R&D expenditures in the prior year, the interaction effect between the previous R&D intensity and high-tech sector, firm size, and growth rate were significant to determine R&D intensity. Moreover, a majority of explanatory variables were found to change between the years 2011 and 2018, while time-lagged effects between the R&D intensity and growth rate exist. Results of the study are expected to be used for future research to detect optimal levels of R&D expenditures for the value maximization of SMEs.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2017

Analysis of future business or investment opportunities, such as business feasibility analysis and company or technology valuation, necessitate objective estimation on the relevant market and expected sales. While there are various ways to classify the estimation methods of these new sales or market size, they can be broadly divided into top-down and bottom-up approaches by benchmark references. Both methods, however, require a lot of resources and time. Therefore, we propose a data-based intelligent demand forecasting system to support evaluation of new business. This study focuses on analogical forecasting, one of the traditional quantitative forecasting methods, to develop sales forecasting intelligence systems for new businesses. Instead of simply estimating sales for a few years, we hereby propose a method of estimating the sales of new businesses by using the initial sales and the sales growth rate of similar companies. To demonstrate the appropriateness of this method, it is examined whether the sales performance of recently established companies in the same industry category in Korea can be utilized as a reference variable for the analogical forecasting. In this study, we examined whether the phenomenon of "mean reversion" was observed in the sales of start-up companies in order to identify errors in estimating sales of new businesses based on industry sales growth rate and whether the differences in business environment resulting from the different timing of business launch affects growth rate. We also conducted analyses of variance (ANOVA) and latent growth model (LGM) to identify differences in sales growth rates by industry category. Based on the results, we proposed industry-specific range and linear forecasting models. This study analyzed the sales of only 150,000 start-up companies in Korea in the last 10 years, and identified that the average growth rate of start-ups in Korea is higher than the industry average in the first few years, but it shortly shows the phenomenon of mean-reversion. In addition, although the start-up founding juncture affects the sales growth rate, it is not high significantly and the sales growth rate can be different according to the industry classification. Utilizing both this phenomenon and the performance of start-up companies in relevant industries, we have proposed two models of new business sales based on the sales growth rate. The method proposed in this study makes it possible to objectively and quickly estimate the sales of new business by industry, and it is expected to provide reference information to judge whether sales estimated by other methods (top-down/bottom-up approach) pass the bounds from ordinary cases in relevant industry. In particular, the results of this study can be practically used as useful reference information for business feasibility analysis or technical valuation for entering new business. When using the existing top-down method, it can be used to set the range of market size or market share. As well, when using the bottom-up method, the estimation period may be set in accordance of the mean reverting period information for the growth rate. The two models proposed in this study will enable rapid and objective sales estimation of new businesses, and are expected to improve the efficiency of business feasibility analysis and technology valuation process by developing intelligent information system. In academic perspectives, it is a very important discovery that the phenomenon of 'mean reversion' is found among start-up companies out of general small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as stable companies such as listed companies. In particular, there exists the significance of this study in that over the large-scale data the mean reverting phenomenon of the start-up firms' sales growth rate is different from that of the listed companies, and that there is a difference in each industry. If a linear model, which is useful for estimating the sales of a specific company, is highly likely to be utilized in practical aspects, it can be explained that the range model, which can be used for the estimation method of the sales of the unspecified firms, is highly likely to be used in political aspects. It implies that when analyzing the business activities and performance of a specific industry group or enterprise group there is political usability in that the range model enables to provide references and compare them by data based start-up sales forecasting system.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.1-33
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• 2019

The small and medium sized enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) are already at a competitive disadvantaged when compared to large companies with more abundant resources. Manufacturing SMEs not only need a lot of information needed for new product development for sustainable growth and survival, but also seek networking to overcome the limitations of resources, but they are faced with limitations due to their size limitations. In a new era in which connectivity increases the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment, SMEs are increasingly urged to find information and solve networking problems. In order to solve these problems, the government funded research institutes plays an important role and duty to solve the information asymmetry problem of SMEs. The purpose of this study is to identify the differentiating characteristics of SMEs that utilize the public information support infrastructure provided by SMEs to enhance the innovation capacity of SMEs, and how they contribute to corporate performance. We argue that we need an infrastructure for providing information support to SMEs as part of this effort to strengthen of the role of government funded institutions; in this study, we specifically identify the target of such a policy and furthermore empirically demonstrate the effects of such policy-based efforts. Our goal is to help establish the strategies for building the information supporting infrastructure. To achieve this purpose, we first classified the characteristics of SMEs that have been found to utilize the information supporting infrastructure provided by government funded institutions. This allows us to verify whether selection bias appears in the analyzed group, which helps us clarify the interpretative limits of our study results. Next, we performed mediator and moderator effect analysis for multiple variables to analyze the process through which the use of information supporting infrastructure led to an improvement in external networking capabilities and resulted in enhancing product competitiveness. This analysis helps identify the key factors we should focus on when offering indirect support to SMEs through the information supporting infrastructure, which in turn helps us more efficiently manage research related to SME supporting policies implemented by government funded institutions. The results of this study showed the following. First, SMEs that used the information supporting infrastructure were found to have a significant difference in size in comparison to domestic R&D SMEs, but on the other hand, there was no significant difference in the cluster analysis that considered various variables. Based on these findings, we confirmed that SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure are superior in size, and had a relatively higher distribution of companies that transact to a greater degree with large companies, when compared to the SMEs composing the general group of SMEs. Also, we found that companies that already receive support from the information infrastructure have a high concentration of companies that need collaboration with government funded institution. Secondly, among the SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure, we found that increasing external networking capabilities contributed to enhancing product competitiveness, and while this was no the effect of direct assistance, we also found that indirect contributions were made by increasing the open marketing capabilities: in other words, this was the result of an indirect-only mediator effect. Also, the number of times the company received additional support in this process through mentoring related to information utilization was found to have a mediated moderator effect on improving external networking capabilities and in turn strengthening product competitiveness. The results of this study provide several insights that will help establish policies. KISTI's information support infrastructure may lead to the conclusion that marketing is already well underway, but it intentionally supports groups that enable to achieve good performance. As a result, the government should provide clear priorities whether to support the companies in the underdevelopment or to aid better performance. Through our research, we have identified how public information infrastructure contributes to product competitiveness. Here, we can draw some policy implications. First, the public information support infrastructure should have the capability to enhance the ability to interact with or to find the expert that provides required information. Second, if the utilization of public information support (online) infrastructure is effective, it is not necessary to continuously provide informational mentoring, which is a parallel offline support. Rather, offline support such as mentoring should be used as an appropriate device for abnormal symptom monitoring. Third, it is required that SMEs should improve their ability to utilize, because the effect of enhancing networking capacity through public information support infrastructure and enhancing product competitiveness through such infrastructure appears in most types of companies rather than in specific SMEs.