• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1-15
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• 2016

Startups in Korea are experiencing for themselves the laws of survival through competition in the local and international market, and are performing active business movements based on these. Korea's economic growth rate is 2.6% due to the slump in the domestic demand and reduced exports brought by the MERSC incident in 2015. The Korea Development Institute has estimated the economic growth rate in 2016 to be around 3.0%. South Korea's economy is facing the crisis of low-growth solidification due to the decrease in economic growth, and it is forecasted that growth without employment and polarization will worsen. Startups in the high-tech industrial generation of a particular field wherein the market environment is rapidly changing must maintain a competitive advantage with the capabilities and functions exclusive to them. It is very important that they maintain a competitive edge by utilizing the capabilities exclusive to startup companies. Likewise, the accumulation of resources is also crucial in determining the success of a startup business. In a poor local startup ecosystem, majority of the startup companies are performing their business activities while striving for survival, rather than success. About 80% are struggling to survive and are failing to overcome the "Death Valley" faced 3-5 years after establishing the company. Since majority of the startups fail to achieve results during the initial stages of foundation, the importance of research on business activities and achievement during the early stages of establishment is being raised. In accordance to this, this research has performed an actual analysis on how the activities of startups during their preparation phase and early stages affect their achievements. A survey was done on the CEOs or executives (people in a position to make decisions) of local small and medium-sized enterprises that are considered start-ups, and 203 valid data were collected and analyzed. Results showed that the discoveries and utilized activities necessary for the businesses of startups have a significant impact on their achievement through the entrepreneur resources and external partners' cooperation; additionally, the related implications were discussed.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-30
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• 2006

According to the available data, in these days, the number of medical accidents and disputes have significantly increased since 1990 in Korea. From this aspect, a variety of approaches and efforts to solve these problems is needed before it is too late. This study intended to identify the thoughts of patients who are directly connected with medical accidents and disputes and then to consider reasonable settlement methods of the increasing disputes. For achieving the purpose of this study, the self-administerd questionnaire was conducted with 450 out-patients who visited three university hospitals, five small and medium-sized hospitals, and ten clinics in Seoul from June 13 to 17, 2005. Incomplete questionnaires were omitted and 410 respondents(91%) were included for the analysis of this study. Each section of the survey was composed of six categories such as the recognition of malpractice, a compensation system about no-fault medical accidents, the recognition of the judgement of medical accidents in court, reasonable settlement of medical accidents, reasons of lawsuit, and the need of the medical dispute settlement organization. The major results of this study were as follows. First, more than half of the respondents, 51.9 percent, worry about malpractice. And many respondents think malpractice causes their symptoms to persist or become worse, and also some respondents think that the doctor's prescription changed too frequently. Second, as for a compensation system about no-fault medical accident, 55.7 percent of the respondents insist that a proper compensation for suffering patients or their families should be provided. And also as for the responsibility of compensation, respondents think joint compensation of both the medical institution and the government is needed foremost, followed by the medical insurance company and finally by the medical institution. The government as well as the related institutions should take responsibility for malpractice accidents for which the doctor is not responsible. Third, as for the acknowledgment of medical accident judgements by the court, 32.8 percent of respondents think that it is best to compromise with a medical institution, followed by lawsuit(26.2%), the assistance of civil organization(23.2%), and a powerful physical protest(7.6%). Fourth, as for the lawsuit of medical accidents, 62.9 percent of respondents think that patients and their families would be in a disadvantageous position in relation to medical institutions and doctors mentioning the lack of professional medical and lawful knowledge, experience and know-how as the reason. So many people have given up appeals owing to the difficulties involved in defending themselves through evidence. Fifth, about a half share of the respondents indicated that the medical institution's neglect of the responsibility of medical accidents is one of the most important reasons of lawsuit. And next respondents mentioned the lack of the medical dispute settlement organization and a general distrust of medical institutions and doctors. Sixth, a majority of respondents consented to the introduction of the need of the medical dispute settlement organization, And about a half of the respondents mentioned a readiness to accept the mediation of the organization, but the rest did not express a clear opinion. It seems that conflict among the parties concerned have existed in relation to the medical dispute settlement organization and related legislation for many years. But as this study has shown, the needs of the medical dispute settlement organization is in desperate demand. Therefore, more negotiation efforts from all interest groups should be considered for the birth of the medical dispute settlement organization and related legislation.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.145-157
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• 2017

SMEs play an important role in the domestic economy. Regarding competency to respond flexibly to unpredictable changes, agility of SMEs is more emphasized. Entrepreneurship orientation is an important factor in the source of SMEs that enable such competency. Entrepreneurial orientation refers to the tendency of a CEO or a member of a corporation to be innovative, risk-taking, and active in the face of various market opportunities. In other words, it refers to the tendency to be expressed in the activities of the entire company without regard to specific technologies or industries. Entrepreneurial orientation has a direct or indirect effect on business performance. Therefore, in this study, we conducted theoretical and empirical studies on the effect of entrepreneurial orientation of SME managers on business performance. Research hypotheses were derived through theoretical research. We focused on the mediating effect of innovation activity and tried to identify the mechanism that entrepreneurial orientation leads to business performance through product innovation and service innovation activity. We investigated whether innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking, which are sub-variables of entrepreneurial orientation, affect business performance through product innovation and service innovation. We conducted a survey of SMEs in Busan and Kyungnam regions to examine the research hypotheses. The results show that product innovation and service innovation have mediating effects. The results of the study are as follows. Product innovation has mediating effect of innovativeness and risk-taking on business performance. Service innovation has been found to mediate innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking on business performance. There was a difference in the mediation effect between the two innovations. Product innovation showed a low mediating effect and a large direct effect. On the other hands, service innovation is relatively more mediating than product innovation. The implications of the research results are derived in relation to the essential differences between product innovation and service innovation. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are presented.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.22
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• pp.137-165
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• 2007

It seems high time to increase productivity by adopting e-business to overcome challenges posed by both external factors including the appreciation of Korean won, oil hikes and fierce global competition and domestic issues represented by disparities between large corporations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Seoul metropolitan and local cities, and export and domestic demand all of which weaken future growth engines in the Korean economy. The demands of the globalization era are for innovative changes in businessprocess and industrial structure aiming for creating new values. To this end, e-business is expected to play a core role in the sophistication of the Korean economy through new values and innovation. In order to examine business performance in e-business-adopting industries, this study analyzed the home shopping industry by closely looking into the financial ratios including the ratio of net profit to sales, the ratio of operation income to sales, the ratio of gross cost to sales cost, the ratio of gross cost to selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expense, and return of investment (ROI). This study, for best outcome, referred to corporate financial statements as a main resource to calculate financial ratios by utilizing Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System (DART) of the Financial Supervisory Service, one of the Korea's financial supervisory authorities. First of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of net profit to sales is as following. CJ Home Shopping has registered a remarkable increase in its ratio of net profit rate to sales since 2002 while its competitors find it hard to catch up with CJ's stunning performances. This is partly due to the efficient management compared to CJ's value of capital. Such significance, if the current trend continues, will make the front-runner assume the largest market share. On the other hand, GS Home Shopping, despite its best organized system and largest value of capital among others, lacks efficiency in management. Second of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of operation income to sales is as following. Both CJ Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping have, until 2004, recorded similar growth trend. However, while CJ Home Shopping's operating income continued to increase in 2005, GS Home Shopping observed its operating income declining which resulted in the increasing income gap with CJ Home Shopping. While CJ Home Shopping with the largest market share in home shopping industryis engaged in aggressive marketing, GS Home Shopping due to its stability-driven management strategies falls behind CJ again in the ratio of operation income to sales in spite of its favorable management environment including its large capital. Companies in the Group B were established in the same year of 2001. NS Home Shopping was the first in the Group B to shift its loss to profit. Woori Home Shopping has continued to post operating loss for three consecutive years and finally was sold to Lotte Group in 2007, but since then, has registered a continuing increase in net income on sales. Third of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to sales cost is as following. Since home shopping falls into sales business, its cost of sales is much lower than that of other types of business such as manufacturing industry. Since 2002 in gross costs including cost of sales, SG&A expense, and non-operating expense, cost of sales turned out to have remarkably decreased. Group B has also posted a notable decline in the same sector since 2002. Fourth of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to SG&A expense is as following. Due to its unique characteristics, the home shopping industry usually posts ahigh ratio of SG&A expense. However, more than 80% of SG&A expense means the result of lax management and at the same time, a sharp lower net income on sales than other industries. Last but not least, the result of the trend analysis on ROI is as following. As for CJ Home Shopping, the curve of ROI looks similar to that of its investment on fixed assets. As it turned out, the company's ratio of fixed assets to operating income skyrocketed in 2004 and 2005. As far as GS Home Shopping is concerned, its fixed assets are not as much as that of CJ Home Shopping. Consequently, competition in the home shopping industry, at the moment, is among CJ, GS, Hyundai, NS and Woori Home Shoppings, and all of them need to more thoroughly manage their costs. In order for the late-comers of Group B and other home shopping companies to advance further, the current lax management should be reformed particularly on their SG&A expense sector. Provided that the total sales volume in the Internet shopping sector is projected to grow over 20 trillion won by the year 2010, it is concluded that all the participants in the home shopping industry should put strategies on efficient management on costs and expenses as their top priority rather than increase revenues, if they hope to grow even further after 2007.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.48 no.3
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• pp.43-68
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• 2023

In this study, in relation to "Chapter 3 Support for Priority Purchase of Technology Development Products" of the 「Market Channel Support Act」, this study investigated the positive growth impact of technology development products subject to preferential purchase on small and medium sized enterprises. The data used for empirical verification is for 371 companies that obtained certification for technology development products subject to preferential purchase in 2016 and Data from SMEs were collected from 2017 to 2021, Sales, operating profit, and net profit was identified, and empirical verification. And conducted through statistical analysis to determine whether it had a positive effect on the growth factors of SMEs. In addition, data from 225 technology development product certification companies were collected, and empirical testing was conducted through t-test analysis on the change in growth factors before and after acquiring certification. As a result of statistical analysis, it was found that the total assets, certified sales, operating profit, and net profit, which are the growth factors of a company, are all positively affected according to the type of technology development product certification. However, in the case of authentication types, some authentications showed significant negative results. In addition, significant results were derived that after acquiring certification had a positive effect on growth factors than before acquiring certification. Consistent with this conclusion, I think that it is effective for technology development-based SMEs to enter the public procurement market and utilize the technology development product priority purchase policy for market exploitation and corporate growth. And the government should strengthen the market support policy to create demand so that SMEs can enter the procurement market and actively utilize the preferential purchase system, and come up with an improvement plan so that public institutions can actively utilize the preferential purchase system.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.105-129
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• 2020

This study uses corporate data from 2012 to 2018 when K-IFRS was applied in earnest to predict default risks. The data used in the analysis totaled 10,545 rows, consisting of 160 columns including 38 in the statement of financial position, 26 in the statement of comprehensive income, 11 in the statement of cash flows, and 76 in the index of financial ratios. Unlike most previous prior studies used the default event as the basis for learning about default risk, this study calculated default risk using the market capitalization and stock price volatility of each company based on the Merton model. Through this, it was able to solve the problem of data imbalance due to the scarcity of default events, which had been pointed out as the limitation of the existing methodology, and the problem of reflecting the difference in default risk that exists within ordinary companies. Because learning was conducted only by using corporate information available to unlisted companies, default risks of unlisted companies without stock price information can be appropriately derived. Through this, it can provide stable default risk assessment services to unlisted companies that are difficult to determine proper default risk with traditional credit rating models such as small and medium-sized companies and startups. Although there has been an active study of predicting corporate default risks using machine learning recently, model bias issues exist because most studies are making predictions based on a single model. Stable and reliable valuation methodology is required for the calculation of default risk, given that the entity's default risk information is very widely utilized in the market and the sensitivity to the difference in default risk is high. Also, Strict standards are also required for methods of calculation. The credit rating method stipulated by the Financial Services Commission in the Financial Investment Regulations calls for the preparation of evaluation methods, including verification of the adequacy of evaluation methods, in consideration of past statistical data and experiences on credit ratings and changes in future market conditions. This study allowed the reduction of individual models' bias by utilizing stacking ensemble techniques that synthesize various machine learning models. This allows us to capture complex nonlinear relationships between default risk and various corporate information and maximize the advantages of machine learning-based default risk prediction models that take less time to calculate. To calculate forecasts by sub model to be used as input data for the Stacking Ensemble model, training data were divided into seven pieces, and sub-models were trained in a divided set to produce forecasts. To compare the predictive power of the Stacking Ensemble model, Random Forest, MLP, and CNN models were trained with full training data, then the predictive power of each model was verified on the test set. The analysis showed that the Stacking Ensemble model exceeded the predictive power of the Random Forest model, which had the best performance on a single model. Next, to check for statistically significant differences between the Stacking Ensemble model and the forecasts for each individual model, the Pair between the Stacking Ensemble model and each individual model was constructed. Because the results of the Shapiro-wilk normality test also showed that all Pair did not follow normality, Using the nonparametric method wilcoxon rank sum test, we checked whether the two model forecasts that make up the Pair showed statistically significant differences. The analysis showed that the forecasts of the Staging Ensemble model showed statistically significant differences from those of the MLP model and CNN model. In addition, this study can provide a methodology that allows existing credit rating agencies to apply machine learning-based bankruptcy risk prediction methodologies, given that traditional credit rating models can also be reflected as sub-models to calculate the final default probability. Also, the Stacking Ensemble techniques proposed in this study can help design to meet the requirements of the Financial Investment Business Regulations through the combination of various sub-models. We hope that this research will be used as a resource to increase practical use by overcoming and improving the limitations of existing machine learning-based models.

• 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.