• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.28-49
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• 2019

This paper explores the characteristics of innovation activities in high growth firms that contribute to national and regional economic growth and job creation. The analysis is based on the 2016 KIS data to analyze the difference in innovation activities between high growth firms and general firms. The main results are as follows: First, high growth firms have a higher proportion of R&D personnel than general firms. Second, high growth firms are actively introducing product innovation, process innovation, and organizational innovation as compared to general firms. In the innovation activities related to product innovation and process innovation, there is no statistically significant difference between high growth companies and general companies except for external R&D. Third, High growth firms are more likely to cooperate with other technology partners than general firms. But, there is no statistically significant difference between high growth firms and general firms in the external knowledge search and the diversity of cooperating partners. Fourth, in terms of protecting innovation, high growth firms are more likely to use all kinds of innovation protection method, such as 'utilizing intellectual property rights', 'maintaining confidentiality', 'adopting complex design methods', 'market preemption ahead of competitors', and the most important means is the intellectual property rights. Fifth, government innovation policies that high growth firms chose as important are 'innovation subsidies and loans', 'acquirement, utilization and protection of intellectual property rights' and 'human resource support'.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.373-396
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• 2015

This study analyzed the determinants of high-growth firms using the technology appraisal data of the Korea Technology Finance Corporation. This study is differentiated from previous studies for three reasons. First, it analyzed the determinants of firms that will grow into high-growth firms in the future, not the characteristics of current high-growth firms. Second, it analyzed high-growth firms by dividing them in two aspects: sales and employment. In other words, they were divided into three types: the case in which a firm achieves high growth in both sales increase and creation of jobs, the case in which a firm achieves high growth in creation of jobs but low growth in sales increase, and the case in which a firm achieves high growth in only sales increase but low growth in creation of jobs. Third, this study applied the technology appraisal indicators of Kibo Technology Rating System(KTRS) by the Korea Technology Finance Corporation as the explanatory variable. As a result of analysis, it was found that a firm achieved high growth in both sales and employment if the position in the technology life cycle was appropriate and the technology readiness level was high. However, it turned out that the management system of technical manpower had conflicting effects on high growth of employment and sales. In other words, a firm that had well managed its technical manpower achieved high growth in terms of employment, but rather showed low growth in terms of sales. This result suggests the inference that firms showing high growth in employment may appear mainly in the high-tech industry where management of technical manpower is important. Accordingly, as a result of adding dummy variables that represent whether or not firms are in the high-tech industry, it was found that the result supported the inference, as firms in the high-tech industry were highly likely to achieve high growth in employment.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.542-560
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• 2016

This study determines whether or not firms can achieve high productivity growth through external technology acquisition. It also identifies the key factors affecting adopting firms' productivity growth by employing the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) methodology, which features computational ease, low data dependency, and decomposition of productivity growth into technical efficiency change and technical change. Results showed that the effects of productivity growth arising from technology transfer became stronger over time. Moreover, patent transfer guaranteed firms' productivity growth, but no evidence was found that factors such as age and size could increase productivity. Finally, cultural similarity could be another factor conditioning the effectiveness of technology transfer in the productivity of adopting firms.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.123-156
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• 2005

Strengthening the competitive edge of SMEs has become one of the most important economic issues in Korea as the bipolarization between large firms and SMEs has deepened. Accordingly, small innovative firms (referred as 'venture firms' in Korea) attract keen attention both from policy makers and academia. Also, we can sufficiently observe how the growth environment for venture firms has evolved, since it has been almost ten years after the Korean government started its support policy for venture firms. Considering this, now is the appropriate time to carry out an analysis of venture firms. From this point of view, this study looks at growth factors for venture firms to draw out policy implications. The empirical analysis shows interesting results. Firms with the following features all showed higher growth rates: firms with high R&D intensity, younger firms, bigger firms, firms using more policy loans, and firms located within and around the Seoul region. However, the empirical analysis has some limitations. The data used in the study is limited in terms of firm information and so there are some insufficiencies. Thus it is of great importance to compile the required data on firms to enable further in-depth studies.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.75-106
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• 2015

The primary goal of this paper is to explore the microeconomic foundation of Korean firms' adoption of foreign technologies. The paper also reviews the overall trend of international technology transfers to Korea. The period covered in this paper is Korea's high growth era, from the 1960s to the 1990s. The works of this paper center on the two questions of what characterizes foreign technologies which had been imported through licensing contracts, and which driving forces expedite technology adoption by firms. The Korean experience provides the context of success in the catch-up growth. The co-movement of technology imports with capital goods imports manifests Korea's effort to improve the technical efficiency toward the world frontier. Underlying this trend are firms' decisions to adopt new technologies. The paper shows that firms respond proactively to wage increases by adopting newer technologies and thus, in turn, increasing employment, which implies the existence of a virtuous interactive mechanism among these factors.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.151-158
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• 2019

The high-technological in the electric and electronic industries is recognized in overseas markets as well. However, the competition for technologies in these industries is increasing. Therefore, electric and electronic firms should be more efficient in their production. so, This paper analyzes the efficiency of High-growth Electrical and Electronics firms using DEA model. We evaluate the CCR, BBC efficiency and RTS(return to scale) of 20 Korean high-growth Electrical and Electronics firms. There are a total of 12 efficient DMUs with a BCC of 1. There are a total of 4 efficient DMUs with a CCR of 1. A total of 11 DMUs were IRS in Scale Efficiency and a total of 6 DMUs were CRS in Scale Efficiency and a total of 3 DMUs were DRS in Scale Efficiency. We also suggest the Electrical and Electronics firms which can be benchmarked based on analyzed information.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.305-315
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• 2021

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the difference in gender of top executives and corporate investment. In addition, this study also extends to how the sensitivity of investment to cash flow varies with the gender of leaders. Finally, the effect of the gender of leaders on firm investment is also tested across firm types (state firms vs. private firms and high-growth firms vs. low-growth firms). Based on the dataset of Vietnamese listed firms over 2007-2017, the fixed-effect model is used to test the hypotheses. The results show that women as chairs of the board tend to lower corporate investment, whereas the gender of CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) does not influence the investment level. Moreover, top female executives are associated with a decrease in the sensitivity of investment to cash flow. These regression results also show that top female executives only have an impact on the rate of investment in private and low-growth firms. The findings of this study are useful for the board of directors in selecting a chairperson in line with the firm's strategies. Furthermore, the findings of this study are also meaningful for policymakers who should monitor the separate role of the CEO and chair of the board in a company.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.157-160
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• 2001

Firms pursue new business opportunities for growth. Market development strategy is one of the growth strategies, which develops new market segments with current products. However, new market generally has high uncertainty, or high risk. Firms should consider the risk in making and implementing the market development strategy. In this paper, an optimal marketing resource allocation model is developed, taking into account the risk attitude of a firm in market development. Under the assumption of exponential utility function, the global optimal solution is derived, and the implications are provided.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.14-35
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• 1999

This paper presents the relationship between the pace of structural change and the magnitude of employment growth in the manufacturing sector in OECD countries. To measure the pace of structural change, the compositional change index in value-added in manufacturing sector is introduced. For mid to long-term there seems to be a positive relationship between the pace of structural change and the magnitude of employment growth. In those countries with higher value of the compositional index, the employment growth in manufacturing sector was generally higher. To analyse the characteristics of structural change in manufacturing sector, this paper classifies manufacturing industries into groups: one based on technology, one on orientation, one on wages and one on skills. The international comparison of manufacturing sector's employment patterns based on above four classifications are presented. International comparison suggests that Korean manufacturing sector move into jobs with more skills and knowledge The structural change of SMEs and large firms are compared based on above four classification methods. It is shown that SMEs' employment in low value sectors, that is low-technology, labor-intensive, tow-wage, and unskilled sectors, have risen faster than SMEs' employment in high-technology, science-based, high-wage and skilled sectors. Large firms' employment have been mainly increased in high value sectors. However, the employment growth of both large and small firms have been concentrated on production worker-intensively-using sectors, i.e. unskilled sectors. This widened the wage differential of production workers by firm sizes and concurrently led to severe shortage of production workers for SMEs, which has little ability to pay high wage to production workers because they usually belong to low-wage sectors. Korea need to push SMEs forward to high value sectors. The premise of that is, however, to pull large firms out of production worker-intensively-using sectors.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.15-41
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of the BSCs of 642 firms excluding the financial and insurance companies listed on KOSPI. The analysis of financial performance through analysis of major financial ratios between BSC and non-BSC firms is compared with the input of human and material resources for business growth. We will promote the spread of BSC and examine the areas differentiated performance improvement. The analytical categories are manufacturing, service, wholesale and retail, and information and communications, which are 2,136 business years out of 2,378 final analytical samples. The results of the analysis are as follows. As a result of the analysis, among the four industries analyzed, the industries that showed the best performance were manufacturing. In the case of service industry, growth and activity were lower than those of non-adoption (NA) companies, but the operating margin was significantly different from manufacturing. However, market value was higher than that of NA companies, and R&D expenditures and advertising expenses were significantly higher than NA firms. On the other hand, there was no significant difference in profitability between the BSC and NA firms, but the market value was very significant. EPS is 5.22 times, BPS is 5.64 times, PBR is 1.3 times, and EVA is 35 times higher. In addition, R&D expenditure and advertising expenditure are more than twice as high as those of NA. In the case of the service industry, there is no significant difference in the growth performance from the NA firms. Activity indicators, BSC introduced companies are three times lower than both the total assets turnover and the capital turnover rate. The operating profit margin was high at 45.8% for introduced companies and 37.2% for non-introduced companies. In market value analysis, only BPS was 1.68 times higher. On the other hand, investment in welfare expenses is 0.2% of total assets, which is relatively low compared to NA firms. However, research and development expenses and advertising expenses are 2.1% and 1.02% of total assets, respectively, but they are relatively lower than those of NA firms. Unlike the manufacturing and service industries, wholesale and retail trade was significantly higher than the NA firms in terms of sales growth and total assets growth rate. In terms of market value, EPS and BPS were significantly higher, but the benefits, R&D expenditures, and advertising expenses were lower than those of NA firms. The information and communication industry showed lower level of performance than the NA firms in all indicators except cash liquidity, BPS, and EVA.