• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.21-56
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• 2022

Since Michael Porter (1991) has proposed that environmental regulation can help a firm increase its competitiveness by encouraging it to engage in more innovative activities to meet the environmental regulation, a number of researchers have empirically investigated the "Porter Hypothesis." However, the empirical results still remain mixed. Combining the perspectives of the behavioral theory of the firm and firm heterogeneity, we argue that the levels of regulation stringency and time-pressure would differentially influence a firm's innovative behavior depending on the firm's aspiration level, performance feedback and technological capabilities. Using the U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) regulation context, we empirically demonstrate that lagging firms that do not meet the new regulation standard announced by the government tend to search for more distant knowledge and that the impact of the patents they file for decreases as the regulation becomes more stringent. In addition, we also find that as time-pressure increases, lagging firms stand to apply for more patents than do leading firms whereas the overall impact of the patents decreases. These results help us advance our understanding of the nuanced causal relationship between regulation and innovation and provide practical implications for policymakers.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-32
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to investigate upon a diversification strategy through market creation of CJ Group, which has contributed in positioning of the firm as one of the leading conglomerates in South Korea. With such objective, the background of CJ Group, followed by its business diversification strategies were explored, with reference to several case studies. The history of CJ Group began with establishment of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation in 1953, as the first domestic sugar producer and exporter of South Korea. The corporation gradually expanded its business ever since at both national and global level, to include the fields of food production, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and life chemicals. Later, CheilJedang (CJ) Group was established as an affiliate of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation. With such independence, extension of business has been witnessed across the industries of media, entertainment, finance, information technology and distribution. Thus, the current CJ Group pursues to define itself as a progressive global living culture company with four major business categories from food and food service, biotechnology, entertainment and media, and logistics. Despite its success in today's market, CJ Group underwent hardships in its business diversification in 1990s due to indiscreet management, along with the Asian financial crisis. Here, many firms overcame the financial difficulties by taking advantage of the exchange rate for overseas expansion. Though, CJ Group tried to differentiate itself by focusing on the domestic market by creating something out of nothing. Hence, CJ Group takes a unique position among many cases of business diversification and their categorization. In an effort to identify and classify the types of growth experienced by the top 30 companies in South Korea, the firms were categorized into four groups according to their diversification strategies adapted after the Asian financial crisis. Based on the mode and time of entry, corporations were identified either as the 'Explorer', 'Invader', 'Venture Capitalist', or 'Assimilator'. Here, the majority of the firms showed the qualities of Invader, entering mature markets through large-scaled mergers and acquisitions. However, CJ Group was the only firm that was categorized as an Explorer, for its focus on the newly emerging service sector in culture-contents industry. This diversification strategy through market creation is worth examining, due to its contribution in generating simultaneous growth between the market and the company itself. Diverse brands of CJ Group have been referred to as case studies in this regard, from 'Hatban', 'Cine de Chef', 'VIPS' to 'CJ GLS'. These four businesses, each to represent processed food, film, restaurant service, and logistics industries respectively, show CJ Group's effectiveness in creating a whole new category of goods and services that are innovative. In fact, such businesses not only contributed in advancement of consumers' wellbeing, but toward generating additional value and employment. It is true that the diversification strategy of CJ Group requires long-term capital investment with high risk, compared to the other strategies mentioned in the paper. However, this model does create high employment and additional values that are positive to both the society and the firm itself. Therefore, the paper comes to a conclusion that the diversification strategy through market creation conveys the most positive impact relative to the others.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.61-72
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• 2013

This research aims to identify promising IT items from the perspectives of Korean SMEs and further to development a policy for SMEs in the IT industry. For this purpose, we adopted a bottom-up approach by discovering IT items on high demand by SMEs as their now growth engines and thus used a survey method. We also analyzed the ecosystem characteristics for the items to help policy-makers establish customized strategy to support their growth. We believe that this research is timely when the concept of ecosystem has emerged and the role of SMEs is emphasized in the IT industry. And the research results are expected to produce valuable information to make a policy for promoting IT items for SMEs and ultimately leading to balanced growth of large firms and SMEs.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 1995

Recently Korean textile industry has been in the phase that requires its strategy change from the less-develped country style of the labor-intensive products to the developed country style of the technology-intensive products. It needs to make more efforts to develop the value-added products to meet the customer's various needs. In addition, development of technology, equipment, and design is required to implement its corporate strategy successfully. Although Korean textile companies have currently kept skillful labor and advanced equipments, they are losing their share in the international textile markets. This is mainly because corporate management has not been involved with efficient strategy. Strategy is an adoption of a company to environment by its corporate members, thus leading to the requirement of coordination of the main functions such as manufacturing and marketing. In fact, the coordination of the two departments toward reaching the corporate goal is not easy since the two are interested in different areas, respectively. Manufacturing people show their interests in production capacity, equipment layout, process technology, quality, purchasing, and labor while marketing people, target customer, product mix, advertisement, product specification, and customer service. For this reason, conflicts sometimes happen between the two departments. There are, however, many area that need a horizontal cooperation, for instance, in layout, process technology, product mix, and potential demand. Therefore, reciprocal coordination is necessary for achieving the firm's common objectives. This study was concerned with determining the factors that enhance the competitiveness of textile firms so that they could reach the common goal of the two departments with a horizontal collaboration.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.15-23
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• 2012

This study is an attempt to explore the nature and characteristics of strategic impact of green strategy by environmental capital, corporate reputation, and technology strengths on the firm's performance across countries. The main question addressed in this paper relates to how corporate sustainability, corporate reputation, technology strength, and capabilities influence the firm's economic performance with respect to diverse dimensions of performance measures including sustained growth through the leading firms across countries in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia-Pacific countries. Particularly, this study attempts to empirically explore the directions and magnitudes of the operational links between new emerging strategic core competencies (e.g., sustainability green strategy by environmental focus for more sustainable path, corporate reputation by corporate social responsibility and image enhancement, and technology strengths to develop a new product and market) and the firm's economic performance with respect to diverse dimensions of performance such as accounting (ROE and EOA) - and market-based performance (Market value and Tobin's q). Considering all possible limitations that might exist with regard to selected samples and methods, this study demonstrates that environmental sustainability, corporate reputation, technological capabilities and competencies through R&D intensity and patent are most likely to be significantly associated with most market-based performance measures, but the strategic significance of other variables such as capital intensity, leverage, and administrative cost efficiency on performance tends to be different depending on which performance measure is used across different countries with diverse economic and business contexts.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-30
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• 2011

InnovVizwas designed and developed anew as avisualization and simulationtool to present innovation and strategy information. The InnovViz system employs two key types of technology, namely mixed reality (MR) and neural network (NN). An experiment was conducted to examine the usability, acceptance and possible adoption of this new system. Participants comprised 4 experts from 4 top performing entrepreneurial firms and 161 master degree students from 2 leading universities. The study used a modified UTAUT model and a cognition and perception model. The results revealed that when the InnovViz was introduced, the key drivers to adoption are Facilitating Conditions (FC) and Voluntary to Use (VOL). Adequate knowledge and sufficient resources were found to strongly affect FC construct. The expert's rating of a firm's innovation and performance was more congruent with senior students with a technology-background than with a finance and accounting-background. InnovViz was seen as providing complex information with an ease of use and usefulness for showing data and assessment. Among the three types of visuals depicted by InnovViz, experts rated their usefulness in descending order as follows: Cube, Tetrahedron and Saturn. Finally, experts found backward simulation to be slightly more useful for assessment than forward simulation.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.71-97
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• 2015

This study examines the effects of several factors indicating economic openness-imported intermediate goods, total imports, IFDI (inward foreign direct investment), and foreign ownership-on regular, irregular jobs and the ratio of irregular employment to regular employment. Findings revealed that imported intermediate inputs and IFDI affected neither regular nor irregular job figures. However, an increase in total imports led to a decrease in the number of irregular jobs without affecting regular full time jobs, leading to a decrease in the ratio of irregular jobs to regular jobs. On the other hand, changes in foreign ownership structure had a contrary effect, that is, a decrease in the number of regular jobs and an increase in irregular ones, and, thus, an increase in the ratio of irregular jobs to regular jobs. Overall results showed that a rise in imports results in depressed overall employment, irregular employment in particular, while more IFDI results in more irregular jobs replacing regular ones, effectively exacerbating job insecurity. The implication of this analysis is that greater economic openness may have a negative impact on the South Korean labor market overall.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.87-100
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• 2013

As the external knowledge networks of firms have become more and more important to their product and service innovations, many global leading companies such as P & G, IBM, and Samsung Electronics have formulated and implemented their open innovation strategy. This study attempts to empirically analyze the effects of CEOs' supports for external knowledge networks, external knowledge network-oriented cultures and inter-organizational knowledge management systems as the major antecedents to external knowledge networks by using the data based on organizational members' perceptions about them. Based on 847 samples collected from employees in three companies in the medical, the construction and the IT service industries, this study performed a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis about the effects of the antecedents to the external knowledge networks on product and service innovations through Partial Least Squares (PLS). The empirical findings of this study show that CEOs' supports for external knowledge network positively influence product and service innovations, partially mediated by external knowledge network-oriented cultures and inter-organizational knowledge management systems. And they also show that external knowledge network-oriented cultures and inter-organizational knowledge management systems have a positive effect on product and service innovations, respectively, partially mediated by external knowledge networks. With these new findings, academic and practical implications are discussed.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.131-152
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• 2016

Group social capital can be defined as an intangible asset that promotes knowledge sharing and social interaction. It is posited here that the group social capital raised and nurtured among group members positively influences on team performance in IS (Information Systems) development projects. And communication effectiveness is selected as a critical antecedent and its detailed relationships with the dimensions of group social capital are analyzed. Effective communication plays important role in ISD project teams by integrating knowledge from different areas. Moderating effects of project phase between the sub-dimensions of social capital and project performance are investigated. Hypotheses are tested using data from 131 project teams of 85 manufacturing firms. The results indicated that Communication effectiveness positively impacted sub-dimensions of social capital (social ties, trust, and shared vision). Moreover, the team performance is influenced by shared vision and trust, leaving social ties as a leading subcontract, as theoretically proposed in prior research. The project phase moderates the impact of shared vision on team performance.

• Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.24-34
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• 2015

The complexity arises in defining the construction quality due to its perception, based on inherent market conditions and their requirements, the diversified stakeholders itself and their desired output. A quantitative survey based approach was adopted in this constructive study. A questionnaire based survey was conducted, for the assessment of construction quality perception and expectations in the context of quality improvement technique. The survey feedback of professionals, from the leading construction organizations/companies of Pakistan were analyzed. The financial capacity, organizational structure, and construction experience of the construction firms formed basis for their selection. After statistical analysis of survey feedback it was found reliable and valid for the inferential purpose to the target population of construction professionals. The quality perception was found to be project scope oriented, considered as an excess cost for a construction project and keeping the rework minimum by qualifying the required quality tests, keeping the defects minimum by ensuring the specifications of supplied material. Any quality improvement technique was expected to address the financial aspects of the construction project for the employer and contractor, by increasing the profitability through reduction in overall cost, reduction in time, reduction in defects and improving the productivity in a construction project. The study is beneficial for the construction professionals to assess the prevailing construction quality perception and the expectations from implementation of any quality improvement technique in construction projects.