A Case study of firm growth and new market creation through commercialization of standard technology - Collaboration between ETRI and Initech -

핵심표준기술의 기술이전사업화를 통한 기업성장 및 신산업 창출 사례연구 - 이니텍(주) ETRI 협력사례를 중심으로 -

In a turbulent environment, it is important for a firm to obtain competitiveness through acquiring new technologies and new knowledge. Many studies has shown that R&D has positive effects on innovation and performance. However, the limitation of resources and research personnel for SMEs leads to the needs of collaboration between government R&D and SMEs. The quantitative results of government R&D comes in the form of patents or publication of papers while the qualitative results comes in the form of commercialization (revenue increase or cost reduction) of the SMEs acquiring the technology through technology transfer. Korean government invested 16.9 Trillion Won in 2013 and achieved remarkable quantitative results but the qualitative results are still yet to be improved. The technology transfer rate in 2011 was 26.0% while the success rate of commercialization of the transferred technology is only 23.6%. Therefore it is meaningful to study the success factors of the technology commercialization in Korea. In this study, a case of technology commercialization between ETRI and Initech is studied. Initech was a venture firm which started in 1997 with 2 employees and after transfer of technology from ETRI in 1999, it has grown to a firm of 238 employees. In this study, Jolly's commercialization model was used to analyze the success factors of the commercialization. It was shown that four main factors that leads to the success are (1) mobilizing interest and endorsement through customer oriented R&D by ETRI, (2) mobilizing resources for demonstration through systematic technology commercialization process by ETRI, (3) mobilizing market constitutents through government standardization that leads to the reliability of the participants, and (4) mobilizing complementary assets for delivery by management strategies of Initech.