• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.63-77
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• 2018

In the rapidly to change global market in recent years, as the era of merging and integrating industries and the evolution of technology have come to an era in which everything can not be solved as a single company, it is evolving into competition for the enterprise network rather than the competition for the enterprise unit. In a competitive business environment, it is necessary to provide not only for the efforts as an individual companies but also the mutual development efforts to enhance output through the innovation activities based on the interrelationship with the business partners. In spite of the recent efforts and research through core competencies and innovation activities, some of business activities were unable to achieve enough progress in business performance and this study mainly focused to improve business performance for those companies. This study targeted CEOs and Directors who participates in "manufacturing performance innovation partnership project" carried by The foundation of Large, SMEs, Agriculture, Fisheries cooperation Korea and studied the influences of innovation activities to the core competencies and business performance. Detailed variables in this study were extracted from the previous research and used for verification. The study is designed to determine the influence of individual innovation activities to the core competencies and business performance. Innovation activities as a parameter, the relationship between core competencies and business performance was examined. In the examination of the innovation activities as a meditated effect, those activities carried by SMEs (Collaboration in Technology, Manufacturing, and Management innovations with Large Scale Business) through partnership in manufacturing innovation is significantly related business performance. Therefore, the result reveals that the individual SMEs are having own limitation in the achievement of significant progress in business performance with their own capabilities, and using the innovation activities act as catalyst through the collaboration with large scale businesses would result significant progress in business performance. Mutual effort in collaborative innovation activities between large scale businesses and SMEs is one of the most critical issues in recent years in Korea and the main focus of this study is to provide analysis which demonstrates where the SMEs are required to focus in their innovation activities.