• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.25-39
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• 2012

According to knowledge-based view, knowledge is an essential strategic resource for a firm to retain sustainable competitive advantage. As knowledge is created and disseminated throughout the firm, the firm can enhance its capability to respond to new and unusual situations. Thus, a lot of companies actively manage their knowledge and intellectual capital. Especially, knowledge management (KM) activities in R&D organizations play a critical role in enhancing R&D performances such as innovation capability. In this regard, this study develops a theoretical model to examine the effects of R&D KM activities on R&D performance. The research model posits KM participation, knowledge management system (KMS) use, and community of practice (CoP) as the main activities of R&D KM. This study proposes that R&D shared knowledge quality and R&D KM satisfaction play a mediating role between R&D KM activities and its performance. The proposed research model was tested by using survey data collected from 248 employees in an R&D department. PLS (partial least squares) was employed for the analysis of the data. The findings of this study showed that R&D KM activities play a significant role in enhancing R&D performance. The findings revealed that R&D shared knowledge quality is not significantly related to R&D performance, while R&D KM satisfaction significantly influences R&D performance. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were described.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.121-137
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• 2013

Now days, firm's technology capability is recognized as important factor to forecast and to evaluate firm's business performance. There are many efforts to develop useful indicators by applying patent information that includes concrete description about technology. Many previous studies analyzed relationship between patent indicators and firm's performance. But they didn't consider time gap between a point of firm's invention activity and a point of firm's performance improvement. They didn't considered a character of industrial fields either. To overcome these limitations, we selected IT industry for target analysis industry. Time-series patent data and financial data from 41 American IT firms between 2000 and 2011 were used to analyze. In this study, We empirically analyzed subsequent effect of patent indicators on firm's business performance by using correlation analysis and regression analysis.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.23-46
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• 2008

The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of business scope and technological capability on firm performance in SMEs. Existing studies on business scopes and technological capabilities have focused on the unilateral relationships with financial performances. This study examines the independent and interaction effects of business scopes and technological capabilities on financial performances of SMEs in capital industries. Based on 228 firm-level data, technological capabilities have positively significant impacts on performance. Business scope measured by product variety and number of buyers have been significantly positive relationships to financial performances. Also SMEs with technological capabilities can moderate the effects of business scope on their performances. However, the results show different relationships depending on measurements on business scope, technological capabilities and performance. The results provide interesting findings on strategic behaviors of SMEs when they pursue growth strategy through expanding business scopes and building technological capabilities.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.109-132
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• 2001

The purpose of this article is to develop a dynamic model of organizational capabilities and knowledge creation, and at the same time identify the organizational capability factors for effective knowledge creation, by empirically analyzing the history of new Quinolone antibacterial drug compound (LB20304a) discovery process at LG, as a case in point. Major findings of this study are as follows. First, in a science-based area such as drug development, the core of successful knowledge creation lies in creative combination of different bodies of scientific explicit knowledge. Second, the greater the difficulty of learning external knowledge, the more tacit knowledge is needed for the recipient firm to effectively exploit that knowledge. Third, in science-based sector such as pharmaceutical industry, the key for successful knowledge creation lies in the capability of recruiting and retaining star scientists. Finally, for effective knowledge creation, a firm must keep its balance among three dimensions of organizational capabilities: local, process, architectural capabilities.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.411-433
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• 2011

This article investigates the impacts of firms' regulatory compliance and voluntary innovation activities in environmental management on the development of their organizational capabilities and the enhancement of their performance, within the Korean context. The study invokes a structural equation analysis. The results indicate that voluntary innovation activity in response to market pressures makes a significant contribution to the development of firm-specific organizational capability and the enhancement of firms' performance, but regulatory compliance activity does not significantly affect either organizational capability or performance. This capability was also seen to have implications for firm's performance. This article also suggests several policy implications related to the research.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.65-91
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• 2016

Although the success of industrial clusters largely depends on whether clustering firms can achieve economic performance, there has been less attention on investigating factors and conditions contributing to the performance enhancement for clustering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Along this vein, we adopt the theories of social capital and organizational learning as those success factors for clustering SMEs. This study thus aims at examining what effect social capital accrued in the relationships among actors within clusters has on firm performance of clustering SMEs and what role organizational learning plays in the linkage between social capital and firm performance. For the empirical analysis, we operationalized the variables and their measures to develop questionnaires through the theoretical reviews on literatures. As a sample of 227 clustering SMEs, our collected data was analyzed by hierarchical regression analysis. The results confirmed that a high level of social capital, represented by network, trust, and norm, has positive effect on firm performance of clustering SMEs. We also found that clustering firms presenting high organizational learning, represented by absorptive and transformative capability, achieve better performance than those placing less value on organizational learning. Furthermore the significant relationship between social capital and firm performance is mediated partially through organizational learning. These findings imply not only that the territorial agglomeration of industrial cluster does not guarantee the performance creation of clustering SMEs but that they need to develop social capital among various actors within clusters, facilitating their knowledge diffusion. In order to absorb and mobilize the shared knowledge and information into strategic resources, the firms should improve their capability associated with organizational learning. These expand our understanding on the importance of social capital and organizational learning for the performance enhancement of clustering firms. Differentiating from major studies addressing benefits and advantages of industrial cluster, this study based on the perspective of firm-internal business process contributes to the literature advancement. Strategic and policy implications of this study are discussed in detail.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.115-145
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• 1998

This paper analyzes the intra-organizational characteristics of the Japanese firm, Kaisha. We want to know how they have been related to the successful story of the Japanese economy, especially to their capability to make a rapid technological breakthrough during the past half century. Intra-firm characteristics will be dealt with from four different but mutually interrelated aspects, which include production organization at the workshop level, incentive system, labor-management relations, and corporate governance. Each will be discussed in turn.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.191-213
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• 2008

This study investigates the effect of technology import and R&D investment on the value of the firm in Korea. The result shows that the technology import announcement effect of firms with a low R&D investment is higher than that of firms with a high R&D investment. The evidence suggests that technology import can substitute the existing R&D capability of the firm. In addition, the result shows that there is an optimal level of technology import and R&D investment to maximize the value of the firm. In particular, firms with a low R&D investment and a large amount of technology import experience the highest announcement effect. The study concludes that an adequate allocation of fim's capital between R&D investment and technology import is needed for firm's optimal technology strategy.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.219-245
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• 2018

Recently Korea affected by the US and China trade wars, has been stagnant in the global trade market. However, the global e-commerce market is growing and emerging with new trade opportunity. The purpose of this study is to derive factors of the execution of cross border electronic commerce in the global e-commerce market and to grasp the effects of these factors on firm performance and ultimately to provide policy implications for export expansion. For this purpose, we conducted a literature review to derive the factors for firm performance in the global e-commerce market. Subsequently, conceptual research model and research hypotheses were estabilished, and empirical analysis was conducted through questionnaires. As a result of the empirical analysis, trust and ICT capability have a positive effect on firm performance, and the impact of trust on firm performance depends on the level of dispute settlement. However, ICT capability does not affect firm performance. This study differs from previous studies in that it considered global e-commerce from the perspective of the enterprise and examined factors for firm performance.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.33-56
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• 2010

The current business environment has been characterized as less munificent, highly uncertain and constantly evolving. In this environment, the company with dynamic capability is reported to be more successful than others in building competitive advantage. Dynamic capability focuses on the link between a dynamically changing environment, strategic agility, architectural reconfiguration, and value creation. Being characterized to be flexible and adaptive to market circumstance changes, an organization with dynamic capability is described to have high resource fluidity, which represents business process, resource allocation, human resource management and incentives that make business transformation faster and easier. Successful redeployment of the resources for dynamic adaptation requires organizational forms and reward systems to be well aligned with firm's technological infrastructures and business process. The alignment is considered to be an executive level commitment. Building dynamic capability is knowledge driven; relying on new knowledge to reconfigure firm's resources. Past studies established the link between the effective execution of a knowledge-focused strategy and relevant setting of architectural elements such as human resources, structure, process and information systems. They do not, however, describe in detail the underlying processes by which architectural elements are adjusted in coordinated manners to build knowledge-driven dynamic capability. In fact, understandings of these processes are one of the top issues in IT management. This study analyzed how a Korean corporation with a knowledge-focused strategy aligned its architectural elements to develop the dynamic capability and thus create value in the dynamically changing markets. When the Korean economy was in crisis, the company implemented a knowledge-focused strategy, restructured the organization's architecture by which human and knowledge resources are identified, structured, integrated and coordinated to identify and seize market opportunity. Specifically, the following architectural elements were reconfigured: human resource, decision rights, reward and evaluation systems, process, and IT infrastructure. As indicated by sales growth, the reconfiguration helped the company create value under an extremely turbulent environment. According to Ancona et al. (2001), depending on the types of lenses the organization uses, different types of architecture will emerge. For example, if an organization uses political lenses focusing on power, influence, and conflict. the architecture that leverage power and negotiate across multiple interest groups would emerge. Similarly, if an organization uses economic lenses focusing on the rational behavior of organizational actors making choices based on the costs and benefits of action, organizational architecture should be designed to motivate and provide incentives for the actors (Smith, 2001). Compared to this view, information processing perspectives consider architecture to be designed to maximize the capacity of information processing by the actors. Using knowledge lenses, the company studied in this research established architectural elements in a manner that allows the firm to effectively structure knowledge resources to form dynamic capability. This study is revelatory single case with a historic perspective. As a result of this study, a set of propositions and a framework are derived, which can be used for architectural alignment.