• Title/Summary/Keyword: competitive learning

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An Intelligent Decision Support System for Selecting Promising Technologies for R&D based on Time-series Patent Analysis (R&D 기술 선정을 위한 시계열 특허 분석 기반 지능형 의사결정지원시스템)

  • Lee, Choongseok;Lee, Suk Joo;Choi, Byounggu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.79-96
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    • 2012
  • As the pace of competition dramatically accelerates and the complexity of change grows, a variety of research have been conducted to improve firms' short-term performance and to enhance firms' long-term survival. In particular, researchers and practitioners have paid their attention to identify promising technologies that lead competitive advantage to a firm. Discovery of promising technology depends on how a firm evaluates the value of technologies, thus many evaluating methods have been proposed. Experts' opinion based approaches have been widely accepted to predict the value of technologies. Whereas this approach provides in-depth analysis and ensures validity of analysis results, it is usually cost-and time-ineffective and is limited to qualitative evaluation. Considerable studies attempt to forecast the value of technology by using patent information to overcome the limitation of experts' opinion based approach. Patent based technology evaluation has served as a valuable assessment approach of the technological forecasting because it contains a full and practical description of technology with uniform structure. Furthermore, it provides information that is not divulged in any other sources. Although patent information based approach has contributed to our understanding of prediction of promising technologies, it has some limitations because prediction has been made based on the past patent information, and the interpretations of patent analyses are not consistent. In order to fill this gap, this study proposes a technology forecasting methodology by integrating patent information approach and artificial intelligence method. The methodology consists of three modules : evaluation of technologies promising, implementation of technologies value prediction model, and recommendation of promising technologies. In the first module, technologies promising is evaluated from three different and complementary dimensions; impact, fusion, and diffusion perspectives. The impact of technologies refers to their influence on future technologies development and improvement, and is also clearly associated with their monetary value. The fusion of technologies denotes the extent to which a technology fuses different technologies, and represents the breadth of search underlying the technology. The fusion of technologies can be calculated based on technology or patent, thus this study measures two types of fusion index; fusion index per technology and fusion index per patent. Finally, the diffusion of technologies denotes their degree of applicability across scientific and technological fields. In the same vein, diffusion index per technology and diffusion index per patent are considered respectively. In the second module, technologies value prediction model is implemented using artificial intelligence method. This studies use the values of five indexes (i.e., impact index, fusion index per technology, fusion index per patent, diffusion index per technology and diffusion index per patent) at different time (e.g., t-n, t-n-1, t-n-2, ${\cdots}$) as input variables. The out variables are values of five indexes at time t, which is used for learning. The learning method adopted in this study is backpropagation algorithm. In the third module, this study recommends final promising technologies based on analytic hierarchy process. AHP provides relative importance of each index, leading to final promising index for technology. Applicability of the proposed methodology is tested by using U.S. patents in international patent class G06F (i.e., electronic digital data processing) from 2000 to 2008. The results show that mean absolute error value for prediction produced by the proposed methodology is lower than the value produced by multiple regression analysis in cases of fusion indexes. However, mean absolute error value of the proposed methodology is slightly higher than the value of multiple regression analysis. These unexpected results may be explained, in part, by small number of patents. Since this study only uses patent data in class G06F, number of sample patent data is relatively small, leading to incomplete learning to satisfy complex artificial intelligence structure. In addition, fusion index per technology and impact index are found to be important criteria to predict promising technology. This study attempts to extend the existing knowledge by proposing a new methodology for prediction technology value by integrating patent information analysis and artificial intelligence network. It helps managers who want to technology develop planning and policy maker who want to implement technology policy by providing quantitative prediction methodology. In addition, this study could help other researchers by proving a deeper understanding of the complex technological forecasting field.

Structural Adjustment of Domestic Firms in the Era of Market Liberalization (시장개방(市場開放)과 국내기업(國內企業)의 구조조정(構造調整))

  • Seong, So-mi
    • KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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    • v.13 no.4
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    • pp.91-116
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    • 1991
  • Market liberalization progressing simultaneously with high and rapidly rising domestic wages has created an adverse business environment for domestic firms. Korean firms are losing their international competitiveness in comparison to firms from LDC(Less Developed Countries) in low-tech industries. In high-tech industries, domestic firms without government protection (which is impossible due to the liberalization policy and the current international status of the Korean economy) are in a disadvantaged position relative to firms from advanced countries. This paper examines the division of roles between the private sector and the government in order to achieve a successful structural adjustment, which has become the impending industrial policy issue caused by high domestic wages, on the one hand, and the opening of domestic markets, on the other. The micro foundation of the economy-wide structural adjustment is actually the restructuring of business portfolios at the firm level. The firm-level business restructuring means that firms in low-value-added businesses or with declining market niches establish new major businesses in higher value-added segments or growing market niches. The adjustment of the business structure at the firm level can only be accomplished by accumulating firm-specific managerial assets necessary to establish a new business structure. This can be done through learning-by-doing in the whole system of management, including research and development, manufacturing, and marketing. Therefore, the voluntary cooperation among the people in the company is essential for making the cost of the learning process lower than that at the competing companies. Hence, firms that attempt to restructure their major businesses need to induce corporate-wide participation through innovations in organization and management, encourage innovative corporate culture, and maintain cooperative labor unions. Policy discussions on structural adjustments usually regard firms as a black box behind a few macro variables. But in reality, firm activities are not flows of materials but relationships among human resources. The growth potential of companies are embodied in the human resources of the firm; the balance of interest among stockholders, managers, and workers of the company' brings the accumulation of the company's core competencies. Therefore, policymakers and economists shoud change their old concept of the firm as a technological black box which produces a marketable commodities. Firms should be regarded as coalitions of interest groups such as stockholders, managers, and workers. Consequently the discussion on the structural adjustment both at the macroeconomic level and the firm level should be based on this new paradigm of understanding firms. The government's role in reducing the cost of structural adjustment and supporting should the creation of new industries emphasize the following: First, government must promote the competition in domestic markets by revising laws related to antitrust policy, bankruptcy, and the promotion of small and medium-sized companies. General consensus on the limitations of government intervention and the merit of deregulation should be sought among policymakers and people in the business world. In the age of internationalization, nation-specific competitive advantages cannot be exclusively in favor of domestic firms. The international competitiveness of a domestic firm derives from the firm-specific core competencies which can be accumulated by internal investment and organization of the firm. Second, government must build up a solid infrastructure of production factors including capital, technology, manpower, and information. Structural adjustment often entails bankruptcies and partial waste of resources. However, it is desirable for the government not to try to sustain marginal businesses, but to support the diversification or restructuring of businesses by assisting in factor creation. Institutional support for venture businesses needs to be improved, especially in the financing system since many investment projects in venture businesses are highly risky, even though they are very promising. The proportion of low-value added production processes and declining industries should be reduced by promoting foreign direct investment and factory automation. Moreover, one cannot over-emphasize the importance of future-oriented labor policies to be based on the new paradigm of understanding firm activities. The old laws and instititutions related to labor unions need to be reformed. Third, government must improve the regimes related to money, banking, and the tax system to change business practices dependent on government protection or undesirable in view of the evolution of the Korean economy as a whole. To prevent rational business decisions from contradicting to the interest of the economy as a whole, government should influence the business environment, not the business itself.

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Research Framework for International Franchising (국제프랜차이징 연구요소 및 연구방향)

  • Kim, Ju-Young;Lim, Young-Kyun;Shim, Jae-Duck
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.61-118
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    • 2008
  • The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.

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A Research on Effective Combination of Elementary Math and Game (초등수학과 게임의 효과적인 접목을 위한 연구)

  • Kim, Ge-won
    • Cartoon and Animation Studies
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    • s.37
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    • pp.393-411
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    • 2014
  • The volume of world market for serious game in year 2015 is expected to be about 9.6 trillion, and the volume of educational serious game market is expected to surpass half of the whole serious game market. In Korea, the development of game for educational purpose has dominated around the education enterprises since late 90s. In 2008, 'Serious Game Forum' was founded led by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism with experts from many fields in the society and there were progressing of making policies and plans for potential development of the serious game industry, but the effects were not successful than expected. In 2012, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology announced commercialization policy of digital textbook by 2015 and the serious game for educational purpose got attention again. Then, the serious game market became more vigorous with the dispersion of smart devices.13) As a result, the serious games on the smart devices or interlocking between the online and smart devices became an important issue in development rather than the online only serious games. Math field has international competitive power through export in the educational serious game market which takes more than half of the serious game market. Therefore, developing serious game for math education is a good area to raise competitiveness in domestic and international game industries. Moreover, it has no received preferences from students and parents although it has high potential for positive change of individuals and society. The reason is that students recognize it as educational content rather than a game and they avoid it, while parents recognize it as game but not an education. This phenomenon happens because the game elements and educational elements are not properly mixed but focused only on education or emphasized only the fun factors of game when it was developed. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to suggest a direction of developing serious games effectively combining with elementary math for elementary students to get interested in math while playing games. The research will analyze the current elementary math textbooks and find contents which may be combined with the game genre that elementary students enjoy playing these days. This research received advice from serious game developers and math education expert group to reflect the inclination of elementary school students, and respond to the demands from parents and educational institutions, and suggested a direction of developing serious games for effective math education.

A Study of the Core Factors Affecting the Performance of Technology Management of Inno-Biz SMEs (기술혁신형(Inno-Biz) 중소기업의 기술경영성과에 미치는 핵심요인에 관한 연구)

  • Yoon, Heon-Deok;Seo, Ri-Bin
    • Journal of Technology Innovation
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.111-144
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    • 2011
  • This study is to confirm the core factors of innovative capabilities and technological entrepreneurship affecting the performance of technology management and business management of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through the consideration about the complex natures of technological innovation affecting by multidimensional factors, this study designs the research model that innovative capabilities, the performances of technology and business management are arranged in accordance with the innovation process; input-output-outcome. To meet this research purpose, the hypothesis are set up based on the previous research studies and the research samples are selected from members of the Innovative Business (INNO-BIZ) Association, located in Seoul and Geyonggi province. As a result of regression analysis to the responses gathered from 360 firms, the performance of business management is influenced positively by the technology superiority, market growth and business profitability which are the dominant factors of performance of technology management. In addition, three sub-variables of innovative capabilities such as R&D, strategic planning and learning capability, have positive effects on both the managerial performances. Innovativeness and progressiveness of technological entrepreneurship affect both the performances positively. Moreover, the co-relation between technological entrepreneurship of an innovation leader and innovative capabilities of organizational members are identified. Lastly, technological entrepreneurship has the mediating effect on the path of leading innovative capabilities to the managerial performances. In conclusion, the research results imply that technological innovation-type firms should periodically evaluate the performance of technology management which are the output of technological innovations and the reinvestment for ultimate business success. And improving and developing innovative capabilities and technological entrepreneurship is required to continuously and consistently investing and supporting resources on technological innovations at the firm-and government-level. It is considered that these are the crucial methods for securing the technologically competitive advantage of SMEs with less resources and narrow innovation range.

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Research of university students' awareness of career development and their preparation for employment (대학생의 진로개발과 취업준비에 대한 인식 연구)

  • Park, Ki-Moon;Lee, Kyu-Nyo
    • 대한공업교육학회지
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    • v.34 no.2
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    • pp.103-127
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    • 2009
  • The purpose of this study is to offer the basic data regarding the problems of the employment training activities and their solutions by way of the research and analysis of the awareness of career development of university students and their preparation for employment opportunities. The results of the study are as follows. First, it is necessary that the students themselves make plans for future jobs and their preparation for them, from the start of their university work. This includes taking employment preparation courses as liberal arts requirements. It also needs to have a systematic association with some organizations such as employment preparation centers. Second, it is necessary that the career portfolios of university students be accepted as materials for objective evaluation so that the companies use them at the time of hiring new employees. If those materials are stored and managed in a database even after their graduation, they will be the strong foundation for the competitive power of the university.Third, it is necessary that university students establish the orientation of employment training in advance, according to their personal and disciplinary possibilities by diagnosing the level of basic employment ability they possess and that they find out the appropriate programs, both personal and disciplinary, to enforce the abilities they need to develop further. Accordingly, it is necessary to have an evaluation system in order to assess student's basic employment abilities, so as to increase the degree of their employment preparation and its support strategy based on the evaluation. Fourth, in the higher education level, university students' lower awareness (M=2.86) of their discipline satisfaction, their major selection, and the university's employment opportunity service shows that it is necessary that there be close connection between learning and work. For short-term purpose, the quantitative and qualitative evaluation must be preceded about the various employment training programs and self-development programs offered by the university. From the long-term perspective, it is urgently necessary that the university ensure the human resources development experts for the purpose of diagnosing employment services within the university.

A Study on the Domestic Small Package Express Service′s Competitive Power Improvement Plan at EC Times (전자상거래 시대 국내 택배업의 경쟁력 향상 방안에 관한 연구)

  • 박영태;정종식
    • Proceedings of the Korean DIstribution Association Conference
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    • 2002.05a
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    • pp.31-59
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    • 2002
  • Recently there are many changes of logistics environment Such as integrated logistics information system, the rapid growth of the domestic and international small package express service and third party logistics with Electronic Commerce. At this time it is very important to deliver to customers the goods sold through EC speedy, accurately and safely. That is to say, the role of small package express service is very important at EC times. The bottlenecks of small package express service in the circumstances of EC are the weakness of EC operating company and small package express service provider the shortage of distribution centre and cargo terminal, the shortage of skilled man with related small package express service etc. So, I suggested that for activation of EC it is necessary to strengthen the strategic alliances, introduce GPS and use the third party logistics positively in the side of small package express service provider. And it is necessary to prepare for the settlements of traffic problems, support the introduction of integrated logistics service, logistics information system, deregulate restriction such as weight limit of vehicles in the side of the government. And to government support throughout extending nation's SOC, deregulation, support to small package express service terminal, permit to stopping & parking in downtown, abolishing a no passing zone, permit to being employed foreigner. Also this service involves ensuring that the product will arrive when wanted, and in an undamaged condition.

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A Hybrid Forecasting Framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Artificial Neural Network (사례기반 추론기법과 인공신경망을 이용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크)

  • Hwang, Yousub
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.43-57
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    • 2012
  • To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.

A Study on the Competencies of Automotive Professional Engineers in Korea (자동차 신제품개발 관련 차량기술사의 전문적 업무역량 분석)

  • Kim, Joo-Young;Lim, Se-Yung
    • 대한공업교육학회지
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    • v.33 no.2
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    • pp.192-217
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    • 2008
  • This paper investigated the perceived criticalities and patterns of Korean Professional Engineer's competency regarding the working activities of automative product development, manufacturing, etc by using questionnaires responded to the survey which were applied to the automotive professors, experts and professional engineers (vocational parties) by e/mail, etc. This research investigated the following questions: First, what are the characteristic patterns, relevancy and perceived criticalities of Korean Professional Engineer's competencies? Second, What are the ranked priority of the Korean Professional Engineers' competencies? Are there any differency for each item, sub group of job, intelectual criterior of the competencies between relevancy and perceived criticalities according to the types of vocational parties, etc.? Accoring to the results; first, Professor group showed highest points among 3 groups per each item of the competencies by vocational parties Second, Chassis design group ranked top position among the 8 sub groups by vocational parties and, third, Problem Solving Knowledge ranked highest points than any others. Korean Professional Engineers are found to be positioned as key members, leaders and managers on surveying market, product planning, designing product & components, developing component parts, establishing shop with production equipment, managing quality control & material handling, organizing relevant meetings, developing human resources by training and learning, to back up finance with law matters, cooperating with concerned parties to achieve organizational goals, and to coordinate projects. etc, identifying ethical issues and business skills in order to survive and win to be competitive in various kinds of the automotive industry battle fields.

The Prediction of DEA based Efficiency Rating for Venture Business Using Multi-class SVM (다분류 SVM을 이용한 DEA기반 벤처기업 효율성등급 예측모형)

  • Park, Ji-Young;Hong, Tae-Ho
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.139-155
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    • 2009
  • For the last few decades, many studies have tried to explore and unveil venture companies' success factors and unique features in order to identify the sources of such companies' competitive advantages over their rivals. Such venture companies have shown tendency to give high returns for investors generally making the best use of information technology. For this reason, many venture companies are keen on attracting avid investors' attention. Investors generally make their investment decisions by carefully examining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives. To them, credit rating information provided by international rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch is crucial source as to such pivotal concerns as companies stability, growth, and risk status. But these types of information are generated only for the companies issuing corporate bonds, not venture companies. Therefore, this study proposes a method for evaluating venture businesses by presenting our recent empirical results using financial data of Korean venture companies listed on KOSDAQ in Korea exchange. In addition, this paper used multi-class SVM for the prediction of DEA-based efficiency rating for venture businesses, which was derived from our proposed method. Our approach sheds light on ways to locate efficient companies generating high level of profits. Above all, in determining effective ways to evaluate a venture firm's efficiency, it is important to understand the major contributing factors of such efficiency. Therefore, this paper is constructed on the basis of following two ideas to classify which companies are more efficient venture companies: i) making DEA based multi-class rating for sample companies and ii) developing multi-class SVM-based efficiency prediction model for classifying all companies. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) is a non-parametric multiple input-output efficiency technique that measures the relative efficiency of decision making units(DMUs) using a linear programming based model. It is non-parametric because it requires no assumption on the shape or parameters of the underlying production function. DEA has been already widely applied for evaluating the relative efficiency of DMUs. Recently, a number of DEA based studies have evaluated the efficiency of various types of companies, such as internet companies and venture companies. It has been also applied to corporate credit ratings. In this study we utilized DEA for sorting venture companies by efficiency based ratings. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), on the other hand, is a popular technique for solving data classification problems. In this paper, we employed SVM to classify the efficiency ratings in IT venture companies according to the results of DEA. The SVM method was first developed by Vapnik (1995). As one of many machine learning techniques, SVM is based on a statistical theory. Thus far, the method has shown good performances especially in generalizing capacity in classification tasks, resulting in numerous applications in many areas of business, SVM is basically the algorithm that finds the maximum margin hyperplane, which is the maximum separation between classes. According to this method, support vectors are the closest to the maximum margin hyperplane. If it is impossible to classify, we can use the kernel function. In the case of nonlinear class boundaries, we can transform the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space, This is the original input space and is mapped into a high-dimensional dot-product space. Many studies applied SVM to the prediction of bankruptcy, the forecast a financial time series, and the problem of estimating credit rating, In this study we employed SVM for developing data mining-based efficiency prediction model. We used the Gaussian radial function as a kernel function of SVM. In multi-class SVM, we adopted one-against-one approach between binary classification method and two all-together methods, proposed by Weston and Watkins(1999) and Crammer and Singer(2000), respectively. In this research, we used corporate information of 154 companies listed on KOSDAQ market in Korea exchange. We obtained companies' financial information of 2005 from the KIS(Korea Information Service, Inc.). Using this data, we made multi-class rating with DEA efficiency and built multi-class prediction model based data mining. Among three manners of multi-classification, the hit ratio of the Weston and Watkins method is the best in the test data set. In multi classification problems as efficiency ratings of venture business, it is very useful for investors to know the class with errors, one class difference, when it is difficult to find out the accurate class in the actual market. So we presented accuracy results within 1-class errors, and the Weston and Watkins method showed 85.7% accuracy in our test samples. We conclude that the DEA based multi-class approach in venture business generates more information than the binary classification problem, notwithstanding its efficiency level. We believe this model can help investors in decision making as it provides a reliably tool to evaluate venture companies in the financial domain. For the future research, we perceive the need to enhance such areas as the variable selection process, the parameter selection of kernel function, the generalization, and the sample size of multi-class.