• International Journal of Costume and Fashion
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.61-79
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• 2013

This study takes a look at the distinct and exclusive culture of Latin America, with a specific focus on Mexico, and attempts to understand its unique cultural identity by comparing, analyzing, and evaluating the characteristics of the Mexican fashion brands, Taller Flora and F$\acute{a}$brica Social, which are brands that have actively used the Latin American cultural identity in its designs. The research method was as follows: 1) performing literature research with specialty publications and thesis that dealt with the two brands 2) analyzing the contents of various articles from the Internet and interviews related to the brands. Thus, this research attempts to understand the characteristics of the fashion brands that use the cultural traits of Latin America in order to dissect its methods and find a way to apply it so that it can be used in different cultures, and in effect, lead to the advancement of the fashion industries, in general. Taller Flora and F$\acute{a}$brica Social are two brands that are able to stand out with a distinct identity by applying traditional native Latin American qualities in its products, as well as its products reflecting a respectful and balanced relationship between people and nature. The characteristics of the two brands are as follows: 1) showing the concept of "the coexistence of diversity" by expressing "the old and the new", "simplicity and flash", and "melding of the Western culture via colonialism and traditional cultures of the aboriginals and other diverse native cultures" 2) achieving "the recovery of the human dignity" by protecting the human rights of the native female artisans and building a network for equality 3) pursuing "free naturalism" by balancing the natural provision of nature and man in addition to promoting environmental protection and conservation of goods 4) becoming "the bridge between communication and exchange" by connecting the artisan, the designer and the consumers together, or the producer and the market, as well as the different cultures of markets from diverse countries.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.83-92
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• 2014

Purpose - A business ecosystem refers to mutually dependent systems interconnected by a loose foundation of various ecosystem members such as customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. The ecosystem-based strategy attempts to achieve competitive advantage for firms by enriching a business ecosystem or building a sustainable business ecosystem through the collaboration and co-evolution of its members. A sustainable business ecosystem is a source of competitiveness for firms anda manageable resource for gaining a competitive advantage. Customers represent the core membership of the business ecosystem and play a pivotal role in building a sustainable business ecosystem. This study examines the effects of customer participation on economic and social value in the business ecosystem and suggests a course of action for building a sustainable business ecosystem. Research design, data, and methodology - Two business cases of South Korea are selected from two different business types: business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) firms. Business ecosystems for B2B and B2C firms reflect contrasting characteristics. Data was collected from in-depth interviews with four representatives of four firms. Results - The study suggested seven propositions for the relationships between customer participation and a sustainable business ecosystem through multiple case studies based on in-depth interviews. The results reveal the following four strategic actions for building sustainable business ecosystems based on the suggested propositions: alignment, systemization, socialization, and co-evolution. Alignment refers to achieving a harmonic balance or virtuous circle among the firm's mission, investment, and value creation. Systemization refers to building and implementing management and infrastructure systems rooted in the corporate culture. Socialization of customers in the business ecosystem reinforces the harmony or virtuous cycle. Finally, co-evolution is associated with the relationship between firms and customers as buyer firms in a restricted business ecosystem. Conclusions - This study considers multiple cases for the execution of a sustainable business ecosystem in collaboration with customers and suggests seven propositions and four strategic actions. The results are based on qualitative data from interviews with business associates from two firms in an open business ecosystem and two firms in a restricted business ecosystem, both in South Korea. Our research results regarding two contrasting business ecosystems shed light on business issues and policy making in Asian business environments, which are in the transition stages from a traditional conglomerate-driven to an inclusive growth-driven economy. The business ecosystem itself should be considered a manageable resource for firms' competitive positions in the market. A customer is a member of the business ecosystem and should thus be viewed not only as a purchasing entity and an object of relationship management but also as a co-creator of value. Therefore, firms should collaborate with customers to build sustainable business ecosystems. For this, firms must create social value, which cannot be created by customers alone, within the business ecosystem. Then, customers participate in a business ecosystem and build it to be favorable to them. Implications for academics and practitioners were suggested.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.255-268
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• 2016

Climate change has increased the need to secure a new water resource in addition to the traditional water resources such as surface water and ground water. The seawater desalination market is growing sharply in accordance with this situation in Korea, "seawater engineering & architecture of high efficiency reverse osmosis (SEAHERO)" program was launched in 2007 to keep pace with world market trend. SEAHERO program was completed in 2014, contributed to turn the domestic technology in evaporative desalination technology to RO desalination technology. Currently, it is investigated that the average specific energy consumption of the whole RO plant is around $3.5kWh/m^3$. The Busan Gi-jang plant has shown $3.7{\sim}4.0kWh/m^3$, including operational electricity for plant and maintenance building. Although not world top level, domestic RO technology is considered to be able to compete in desalination market. Separately, many researchers in the world are developing new technologies for energy savings. Various processes, forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD) process are expected to compete with RO in the future market. In Korea, FO-RO hybrid process, MD and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) process are under development through the research program in Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT). The desalination technology level is expected to decrease to $2.5kWh/m^3$.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.81-93
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• 2023

Under the digital economy, companies are facing a new business environment. Previous studies with a traditional perspectives on start-ups explained they are at a disadvantaged compared to large companies in mobilizing resources and building new relationships. However, recent researches on the digital economy and platform ecosystems have suggested that digital platforms can be an efficient means of overcoming the liabilities of smallness and newness for start-up companies. Through platforms start-ups can secure routes to mobilize resources, collect and analyze market information. Especially as various platorms are established within categorized industry or market, unique characteristics and market awareness regarding an individual startup company have been formed. Accordingly there is also an advantage that startup companies have umbrella effect by participating in the platform. From this point of view, this study describes the process by which a start-up company effectively utilizes a platform to overcome the liabilities of newness and smallness through the case the study of 'Genie the Bottle'. The results suggest that platforms play a crucial role for start-ups to secure awareness and legitimacy and grow the market in the beauty industry in which high consumer involvement is dominant.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.109-130
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• 2011

One of the major problems in the area of data mining is the size of the data, as most data set has huge volume these days. Streams of data are normally accumulated into data storages or databases. Transactions in internet, mobile devices and ubiquitous environment produce streams of data continuously. Some data set are just buried un-used inside huge data storage due to its huge size. Some data set is quickly lost as soon as it is created as it is not saved due to many reasons. How to use this large size data and to use data on stream efficiently are challenging questions in the study of data mining. Stream data is a data set that is accumulated to the data storage from a data source continuously. The size of this data set, in many cases, becomes increasingly large over time. To mine information from this massive data, it takes too many resources such as storage, money and time. These unique characteristics of the stream data make it difficult and expensive to store all the stream data sets accumulated over time. Otherwise, if one uses only recent or partial of data to mine information or pattern, there can be losses of valuable information, which can be useful. To avoid these problems, this study suggests a method efficiently accumulates information or patterns in the form of rule set over time. A rule set is mined from a data set in stream and this rule set is accumulated into a master rule set storage, which is also a model for real-time decision making. One of the main advantages of this method is that it takes much smaller storage space compared to the traditional method, which saves the whole data set. Another advantage of using this method is that the accumulated rule set is used as a prediction model. Prompt response to the request from users is possible anytime as the rule set is ready anytime to be used to make decisions. This makes real-time decision making possible, which is the greatest advantage of this method. Based on theories of ensemble approaches, combination of many different models can produce better prediction model in performance. The consolidated rule set actually covers all the data set while the traditional sampling approach only covers part of the whole data set. This study uses a stock market data that has a heterogeneous data set as the characteristic of data varies over time. The indexes in stock market data can fluctuate in different situations whenever there is an event influencing the stock market index. Therefore the variance of the values in each variable is large compared to that of the homogeneous data set. Prediction with heterogeneous data set is naturally much more difficult, compared to that of homogeneous data set as it is more difficult to predict in unpredictable situation. This study tests two general mining approaches and compare prediction performances of these two suggested methods with the method we suggest in this study. The first approach is inducing a rule set from the recent data set to predict new data set. The seocnd one is inducing a rule set from all the data which have been accumulated from the beginning every time one has to predict new data set. We found neither of these two is as good as the method of accumulated rule set in its performance. Furthermore, the study shows experiments with different prediction models. The first approach is building a prediction model only with more important rule sets and the second approach is the method using all the rule sets by assigning weights on the rules based on their performance. The second approach shows better performance compared to the first one. The experiments also show that the suggested method in this study can be an efficient approach for mining information and pattern with stream data. This method has a limitation of bounding its application to stock market data. More dynamic real-time steam data set is desirable for the application of this method. There is also another problem in this study. When the number of rules is increasing over time, it has to manage special rules such as redundant rules or conflicting rules efficiently.

• Korean small business review
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.59-86
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• 2021

The platform concept has been used for business operations in various forms: product platforms, transaction platforms and industry platforms. All these platforms have common characteristics of having 'core' that is reused frequently and 'peripherals' that are less reusable and changed often. Companies use platforms to enable efficient development and creation of product family, transactions and innovation. These platforms provide new opportunities for many small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) by bringing changes to traditional industrial structures focused on the products rather than platforms. The service robotics industry in South Korea is mainly composed of technology-intensive SMEs due to its small market size. Although these SMEs succeed in developing technologies, they have difficulties creating and expanding markets to sell products. Thus, this study addresses the characteristics and problems of the South Korean service robotics industry and analyses how ROBOPRINT, one of the SMEs in the service robotics industry, successfully creates and continuously expands the service robot market by adopting platform concept. The results indicate that ROBOPRINT has been applying two types of platforms: product and transaction platforms. First, ROBOPRINT created art robots that were apartment mural service robots. Rather than selling art robots, the company developed various robots such as painting robots, building exterior wall-cleaning robots by reusing the core technology of the robots. The company also developed various robots according to the buyers request. In addition, the company used the robots to directly provide apartment mural services for customers. This mural service has been extended into various areas, not only in apartments but also in soundproof walls, underground passages, and retaining walls. Besides, ROBOPRINT added new services continuously by developing technologies such as virtual reality. Second, ROBOPRINT mediated mural service buyers and mural designers. This platform reduced buyers' workload, which necessitates requesting mural services to ROBOPRINT and searching for mural designers. For designers, this opened up new opportunities to participate in the mural business. The platform attracted both mural buyers and designers who were scattered before. Finally, ROBOPRINT seeks to expand the platform's scope to outside company. To share internally reused ROBOPRINT's technology with other companies, the company participated in Daegu city's 'New Technology Platform Industry'. Furthermore, ROBOPRINT is trying to share the service platform by leasing robots to other companies. This allows external agents to develop technologies and provide services by reusing resources from ROBOPRINT. This study contributes to existing theories by showing that SMEs continuously create and expand markets by building various platforms. Moreover, it provides useful implications for practitioners by describing the firm's specific platform-building strategy.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.39-50
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• 2014

After the global financial crisis, domestic construction industry has gone through a rapid recession. This resulted in gradual market shift towards architectural remodeling. Architectural remodeling not only improves residential environment but it has many advantages such as increase of each unit's exclusive area, free space within the horizontal or extension of an annex building, and increase number of household through splitting the household of bigger pyeong, etc. However, in case of the Korean market for apartment remodeling, due to various regulations and problem with business promotion procedures, majority of business is slow despite the figure that remodeling volume is not that small. Also, feasibility study which decides to push ahead public house remodeling business will have a flaw using net present value's law; it has a flaw of not considering properties of each phase of remodeling business and future's uncertainty. Hence, this research will improve the problem of traditional value assessment method of net present value's law. It will also consider one of the real options such as binomial model in order to supplement NPV which is used in current feasibility study. This research was based on real successful cases of public house remodeling and it was possible for feasibility study which was more realistic and valid. This research provided foundation for development of Korean public house remodeling market. There is high anticipation of increasing the validity by improving the problems of current feasibility study and economic efficiency assessment.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.107-114
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• 2013

The interest in traditional Korean housing has greatly increasing in Korean housing market. However, it is difficult to wildly disseminate for a high construction cost reason. In order to effectively facilitate the Hanok construction, Korean government has initiated a project that develops a new style Korean housing, which meets the requirements of low cost and modernized life style. Cost of building is mainly affected by materials and construction methods. Hanok has some special commodities those significantly impact the cost. In order to effectively cut down the costs, well-organized planning for costs is very important. Also, improving the productivity by utilizing new materials and methods can result in cost down. In this context, this paper compared and analyzed two different types of Korean housing; one is a modernized Korean house which used new materials and methods, the other is a traditional Korean house which was build up by purely traditional methods. Productivity has also been compared and analyzed for 5 major commodities between two types of models. Based on these comparative data, effect of cost down by new model has been analyzed. As a result it is confirmed that by using the new materials and methods could highly effect to increasing productivity and cost down. Especially, the cost of Roofing have been more influenced by using new material while the Wood and Finishes have been influenced by new construction method. Construction cost of Foundation (Earthwork, Concrete, Masonry) and Openings were influenced both factors, changing of materials and methods.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.175-185
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• 2023

Upon analyzing labor productivity in the construction industry across OECD countries, it was found that in 2019, labor productivity per employee in the South Korean construction industry was lower than that of major developed countries when adjusted for purchasing power parity(PPP). Specifically, when benchmarked against other countries at a base of 100, South Korea scored 76.9 in the United States, 88.4 in Japan, and 85.1 in the OECD average. Notably, South Korea ranked 25th in labor productivity per employee in the construction industry among 35 OECD countries in 2019, indicating a low standing. A comparative analysis of the construction market size and labor productivity in the construction industry across OECD countries revealed that larger construction markets did not necessarily correlate with higher labor productivity. To enhance labor productivity in the construction industry, this study proposed the active implementation of smart construction technology at construction sites and the promotion of on-site assembly work using off-site construction(OSC) technology, rather than traditional on-site labor. Moreover, it was recommended that the development of modular construction methods and technologies be expanded. In the future, if off-site production methods and modules are further developed through advanced robotics and factory automation, labor productivity is anticipated to increase due to the restructuring of production methods, such as manufacturing.

• Spatial Information Research
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.123-131
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• 2011

The object of this study is to build service model that combines developing IT technology with construction filed. It combines existing traditional construction project with high-tech IT choosingly, diverting construction project from labour-intensive to value-added technology-intensive industry. By doing so, it plans improving productivity and creation of new market. Now most ideal field of combining construction with IT technology is U-City industry that is being emphasized recently. Therefore, For this study, We analyze present condition of several IT technology used in construction and U-City project. Also, determining priority of promising IT technology for requirement analysis of consumer. And it proposes plan for construction of U-City service model through prospect and environment analysis of U-City and IT industry.