• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.75-86
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• 2009

This paper studies examines the R&D efficiency in Korean energy industry by making multiple logistic regression of the product technological level with firms' endogenous technological efforts and cooperations for R&D between upstream and downstream firms. The technological level of Korean energy industry is analyzed to have been positively influenced by economy of scale effect and cooperations for R&D between upstream and downstream firms, but negatively impacted by firm size, and not impacted by competitive market structure, R&D investment, and R&D manpowers. The implications of this study are as follows: i) to heighten the technological level, domestic market would be transformed to be more competitive; ii) Korean Energy industry should make efforts intensifying R&D-related manpowers and investments; iii) although the firm size is analyzed to have negative impact on technological level, firms, lager or smaller, must be supported to accumulate technological capabilities; iv) R&D-cooperating efforts between upstream and downstream firms on the value-chain should be supported.

• The Journal of Small Business Innovation
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1-17
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to suggest an efficient way for ventures to achieve innovation performance through R&D cooperative arrangements. Achieving innovation is one of the critical factors for the survival of ventures. Unlike established firms, ventures often do not have the specialized assets necessary to take technological developments to the product and market stages. Young and resource-constrained firms can achieve innovation by finding and accessing to the complementary resources from R&D cooperation. In the current business environment, many firms are likely to engage in multiple simultaneous R&D cooperations with different partners. Recent research stream addresses the importance of efficient cooperation management from the holistic portfolio perspective. Since maintaining the multiple cooperative relations require substantial amount of time and effort, managing cooperative relationships play a more important role to resource-constrained firms. In order to find an efficient composition of R&D cooperative partners, we mainly focus on the diversity of partner type and dependence level in partnership. We analyze the data on Korean manufacturing ventures collected in the Korean Innovation Survey (KIS) which was conducted by the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI). The KIS questionnaire assesses the existence of cooperative relationships with different types of partners respectively. The types of cooperating partners are affiliated companies, suppliers, clients & customers, competitors or other firms in the same industry, consulting firms, universities, and research institutes. We confirm that ventures obtain relatively higher benefits from R&D cooperation compared with established firms in terms of innovation performance. The results show that a moderate level of diversity in cooperative partner type composition increases innovation. Moreover, diversity of cooperation dependency among the partners enhances innovation performance. Likewise, concentrating on the quality aspects of cooperative composition, such as diversity of partners and degree of dependencies, this study offers some implications for ventures in managing partners from an integrative perspective.