• The International Journal of Costume Culture
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.31-42
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• 1999

The category killer that has been rapidly growing mainly in advanced countries since early 1990's, is a mew distribution model which aims for obtaining market controlling power by surpassing competing businesses in a specific area of products. The domestic situation of category killers is very different from that of advanced ones abroad since it has just been introduced into the Korean market. At the moment, there are only 10 or so companies operating in the market : Geopyung's , Taeheng's , Midopa's , of Sinsegye Department store, adn of Yerim International. The purpose of this study is to examine problems of domestic companies in the present market by analysing the operation status of category killers in domestic markets as well as foreign ones, and to suggest a counter-strategy of category killers for the distribution environment of the 21st century to improve the competitiveness of Korean distribution industry. The competitiveness of category killers lies above all in products lines. Category killers are equipped with the greatest number of products lines among those of competing businesses due to maximized product selections in an limited range. Another source of competitiveness may be found in balanced strategy positioning. That is to say, category killers are in a position where they can adjust policies towards any of the three purposes while aiming at them altogether : prices of discount stores, products range of specialty stores, and customer service level of department stores. It is also necessary for efficient store operation to use information technology such as electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic pose system(EPOS) and electronic funds transfer (EFTPOS). As for the cost structure, category killers can gain an advantage over other business since operating cost of various sections can be saved. There are, however, certain risks that category killers with strong competitiveness may influence on other businesses a great deal and even facilitate their decline. Yet it seems that the growth of category killers will be more viciously restrained by continuous challenges from other businesses. The distribution industry is supposed to develop through such competition and restraint.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2015

Korea has witnessed an increasing number of domestic patent applications, but a majority of them are not utilized to their maximum potential but end up becoming obsolete. According to the 2012 National Congress' Inspection of Administration, about 73% of patents possessed by universities and public-funded research institutions failed to lead to creating social values, but remain latent. One of the main problem of this issue is that patent creators such as individual researcher, university, or research institution lack abilities to commercialize their patents into viable businesses with those enterprises that are in need of them. Also, for enterprises side, it is hard to find the appropriate patents by searching keywords on all such occasions. This system proposes a patent recommendation system that can identify and recommend intellectual rights appropriate to users' interested fields among a rapidly accumulating number of patent assets in a more easy and efficient manner. The proposed system extracts core contents and technology sectors from the existing pool of patents, and combines it with secondary social knowledge, which derives from tags information created by users, in order to find the best patents recommended for users. That is to say, in an early stage where there is no accumulated tag information, the recommendation is done by utilizing content characteristics, which are identified through an analysis of key words contained in such parameters as 'Title of Invention' and 'Claim' among the various patent attributes. In order to do this, the suggested system extracts only nouns from patents and assigns a weight to each noun according to the importance of it in all patents by performing TF-IDF analysis. After that, it finds patents which have similar weights with preferred patents by a user. In this paper, this similarity is called a "Domain Similarity". Next, the suggested system extract technology sector's characteristics from patent document by analyzing the international technology classification code (International Patent Classification, IPC). Every patents have more than one IPC, and each user can attach more than one tag to the patents they like. Thus, each user has a set of IPC codes included in tagged patents. The suggested system manages this IPC set to analyze technology preference of each user and find the well-fitted patents for them. In order to do this, the suggeted system calcuates a 'Technology_Similarity' between a set of IPC codes and IPC codes contained in all other patents. After that, when the tag information of multiple users are accumulated, the system expands the recommendations in consideration of other users' social tag information relating to the patent that is tagged by a concerned user. The similarity between tag information of perferred 'patents by user and other patents are called a 'Social Simialrity' in this paper. Lastly, a 'Total Similarity' are calculated by adding these three differenent similarites and patents having the highest 'Total Similarity' are recommended to each user. The suggested system are applied to a total of 1,638 korean patents obtained from the Korea Industrial Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS) run by the Korea Intellectual Property Office. However, since this original dataset does not include tag information, we create virtual tag information and utilized this to construct the semi-virtual dataset. The proposed recommendation algorithm was implemented with JAVA, a computer programming language, and a prototype graphic user interface was also designed for this study. As the proposed system did not have dependent variables and uses virtual data, it is impossible to verify the recommendation system with a statistical method. Therefore, the study uses a scenario test method to verify the operational feasibility and recommendation effectiveness of the system. The results of this study are expected to improve the possibility of matching promising patents with the best suitable businesses. It is assumed that users' experiential knowledge can be accumulated, managed, and utilized in the As-Is patent system, which currently only manages standardized patent information.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.115-151
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• 2010

Recently Korean universities show very rapid increases in both patents and R&D (research and development) expenditures. During the period from 1970 to 2008, university R&D spending has on the average increased 15.3% annually. Along with steady increases in R&D spending, university's research outputs have also continuously increased. In 1990 Korea as a total published 1,613 SCI-level scientific papers and Korean universities applied 27 patents to Korea patent office. In 2008, Korea published more that 35,000 SCI papers and Korean universities applied about 7,300 patents. The growth of scientific articles had begun from the early 1990s whereas the growth of patent has ignited entering the 2000s. The paper tried to investigate university research through the window of patent. Patents lie between invention and innovation and represent the potential value of invention which will be realized at the marketplace. Since Korean patents do not contain citation information, the paper used US patents-NBER patent database-as the main data. The key empirical question is whether Korean university patents granted from USPTO are characteristically different from other Korean patents granted from USPTO. Previous studies on US and Europe show that corporate patents are more stylized in appropriablity of invention, whereas university patents basicness. In case of Korea, the paper confirmed the appropriability characteristic of corporate patents; but the Korean unversity patents are not distinguishable in terms of basicness. The paper estimated the citation frequency function-an empirical model which was firstly developed by Caballero and Jaffe (1993) and later articulated by Jaffe and Trajtenberg (1996, 2002). The model is specified mainly composed of two interacting parts-diffusion effect and obsolescence effect of new ideas or innovations. Estimation results show that differences in forward citations between university and corporate patents are not statistically significant, after controlling self-citation. Since forward citations represent the quality of patents, this estimation result implies that there are no statistically significant quality differences between university and corporate patents. Prior research results, based on the same model of citation frequency function, about US and some European cases show that, in terms of forward citations, university patents are generally superior to corporate patents -for the case of US- or, the former not inferior to the latter-for the case of most of Europe. It is argued that some important and significant policy changes caused the rapid rise of university patents in Korea. Policy changes include the revision of technology transfer act allowing the ownership of publicly-funded research results to researchers and the changes in faculty/professor evaluation which gives more credit to the number of patents. These policy changes have triggered the rapid growth of the number of university patents. The results of the empirical analysis in this paper indicated that Korea now needs to make further efforts to enhance the quality of university patents, not just to produce more numbers of patents.