중소기업에서 시장지향성과 기술혁신의 관계에 관한 탐색적 연구 : 외부 협력의 조절효과를 중심으로

Abstract

Today's enterprises place more and more importance on technological innovation to maintain their competitive edges in the midst of global competition and rapid technological advancements. Such a corporate environment makes no exception for small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs), which play a central role in the local economy. In that sense, the technological innovation of small SMEs is one of the stepping stones for them to reinforce their competitiveness and maintain their long-term survival and growth in a global competition and secure the ongoing growth of the local economy. Technological innovation can help them improve their competitiveness and profitability by allowing them to introduce new processes and thinking into their various management activities and provide their customers with more competitive products and services through the launch of new products and services. However, the poor internal resources that today's SMEs have are not enough to even maintain a competitive edge and impose many restrictions on their efforts to promote innovation and thus secure further competitiveness. Thus, there is a need for them to make active use of external technology and knowledge based on their own resources and capabilities in order to promote technological innovation. By reinforcing their external cooperation on technology, SMEs can facilitate learning processes to obtain needed expertise, take opportunities to share resources they do not possess, and actively promote innovation. Thus technological innovation in SMEs should be approached by taking into account various social and cultural factors, since it is not possible through only the capability of one single company. In such a situation, many researches have been done on management environment, entrepreneurship, internal capacity, networks of technology and technological cooperation, interactive effects of the ability to absorb knowledge, and utilization of external resources affecting technological innovation in relation to the influence on the technological innovation of SMEs in the nation. However, there has been a shortage of research that considered both market orientation as a corporate culture to affect the technological innovation of SMEs and external cooperation to help them overcome their limitations with resources and capabilities. Market orientation, which is an active action taken by a company to create a superior value for consumers, can be understood through a corporate culture needed to achieve excellent results or company-wide efforts to gather, spread, and react to market information reflecting the needs of current and prospective consumers. As a part of corporate culture trying to actively embrace consumer needs, market orientation affects the level of technological innovation and furthers the competitive edge and growth of a company. Thus the study presents two research hypotheses: First, there will be close correlations between market orientation and technological innovation sought after by SMEs. While providing customers with greater value added and actively reacting to the acts of their rivals to constantly create competitive edges in the market, SMEs will influence their technological innovation to develop new processes and improve the old ones. In the end, market orientation will drive the technological innovation pursued by a company. Second, market orientation will have greater influences on technological innovation when SMEs secure their needed resources and capabilities through cooperation with outside players to overcome their limitations with resources and capabilities. Thus they can actively react to the market flows and implement technological innovation to meet the market and customer needs by securing the resources they lack from the outside. The study saw cooperation with an outside player to overcome limitations as an organization's situational factor and examined its mediating effects between market orientation and technological innovation. The study analyzed relations between market orientation and technological innovation among the SMEs in the field of machinery and metals in Gyeongnam Province and the mediating effects of external cooperation in an empirical manner. The analysis results can be summarized as follows: First, customer orientation and competitor orientation as the variables of market orientation had significant positive (+) effects on product innovation and process innovation, respectively, as the types of technological innovation. Second, the technological cooperation with suppliers had significant positive (+) mediating effects on relations between customer and competitor orientation and product innovation. However, external technological finance, technological cooperation with colleges, universities, or research institutions had no statistically significant mediating effects on relations between market orientation and technological innovation. Those results of empirical analysis offer the following implications: First, market orientation makes active reactions to changes to environments and customers inside SMEs and thus promotes technological innovation to improve the existing products or to create new ones. Second, given that SMEs have a lot of room to be improved in terms of finance, manpower, and technology market orientation, which represents efforts to provide customers with superior values to those of their competitors in an effective fashion, partially and rarely supports the argument that they can activate technological innovation by collaborating with other enterprises or public agencies outside them. Third, the results of empirical analysis show that the SMEs in the field of machinery and metals in Gyeongnam Province were not fully aware that they could promote technological innovation more actively through their collaborations with external organizations in the pursuit of technological innovation to realize market orientation. It is well reflected in the fact that their technological innovation is under the huge influence of market orientation and that their technological cooperation with external organizations has no big impacts as the mediating effects of market orientation. Finally, there is a need to search for ways to facilitate technological innovation in SMEs by combining policies to support their technological innovation with their market orientation, given that they have relatively limited resources compared with large enterprises and are part of the pillars to promote local economy. The plans to activate cooperation among industry, academy, and research, which can promote technological innovation in SMEs through cooperation with local research institutions, should be implemented in a concrete manner so that SMEs with a shortage of finance can realize their market orientation. Through cooperation among industry, academy, and research, SMEs will be able to have a chance to risk long-term uncertainties and achieve groundbreaking technological innovation rather than focusing on gradual innovation to produce visible short-term results. The study has the following limitations: First, the results cannot be generalized to all SMEs in that the survey was done only among the SMEs in the field of machinery and metals in Gyeongnam Province and that the return rates were low. Second, the study used only categorical variables to measure the variables of external cooperation affecting technological innovation, thus failing to consider many quality characteristics to measure external factors. Finally, the study measured technological innovation only with process and product innovation, thus failing to reflect a variety of variables to measure the results of innovation activities such as innovation counts and patents.