An empirical study of evaluating the Korean firm's technological knowledge assets

한국 기업의 기술지식자산 평가에 대한 실증연구

Being the new paradigm of "knowledge based economy", knowledge asset get to be the key to evaluate the firm's value. For a instance, Scandia firstly informed the intellectual capital report with its own financial statements in 1994. Some financial institutions have emphasized the roles of knowledge assets in the evaluating firm's value, too. But the concept of knowledge asset is so extensively defined that the result of evaluation is not as much reliable as financial statements. As previous studies examined the firm-specific cases, the sectoral pattern of knowledge asset has been ignored and it cause the difficulty in the empirical study. Moreover, the objectivity of study is ambiguous. Therefore, we regards knowledge asset as a technological knowledge asset. Which is related to R&D(research & development) and technology. Because this definition is more measurable than others and can play a frontier role in evaluating the knowledge asset. We extract the criteria related to the technological knowledge asset through the survey of 'Scandia' and other previous studies and add other criteria, which explain the Korean-specific environments. We gather data from "Technological Innovation"(STEPI, 1997, 1999) and "The bibliography of Korean R&D institutes"(KITA,1998) and "the survey of listed company"(Daewoo Securities, 1998. 1999). As the results of empirical study, the variables which explain the financial value of firms do not reflect the 'technological knowledge asset' well. It results from the factors as followings. Firstly, instead of stock price the proxy measurement related to 'knowledge asset' is needed. Secondly, the sample is biased to the large scale firms so we'll collect samples more broadly. Finally, the concept of 'technological knowledge asset' is too narrow to explain the value of firm. We expect the result of this empirical study gives contribution to the evaluation of firms' value more exactly.