한국 서비스중소기업의 혁신 특성과 중소기업 정책의 과제

Abstract

The growth and structural improvement of the service industry in Korea are recognized as significant factors for sustainable growth of the Korean economy as a whole. OECD(2008) suggested Korea should enhance productivity of service industry, which has stagnated at approximately the 60% level of the manufacturing sector in recent years. Perhaps the reason of such stagnation is that the service sector is mainly comprised of SMEs. In general, SMEs suffer from a shortfall of resources. An initiative for innovation becomes necessary to overcome those resource constraints. Given that, the innovation of service industry is crucial not only for the further development of Korean economy, but also for SMEs. The determinants and underlying characteristics that bolster innovations in the service industry are in many respects different from those in the manufacturing sector. Thus, this study attempts to identify appropriate determinants for the innovation of the service industry. To that end, the hypotheses on the relationship of innovation performances with their determinants, such as firm, network, sector and institutional characteristics are established and tested against a dataset. Some practical policy implications to effectively promote innovative activities of Korean SMEs are derived from the results of the theoretical propositions and empirical analyses. The dataset used in this study for empirical analysis is adopted from The Korean Innovation Survey 2006 on the Service Sector constructed by the STEPI (Korea Science and Technology Policy Institute). It contains 2,184 firms that have been operating with more than 10 employees in the 20 different business areas of the service industry during the period 2003~2005. Of the firms, this study focused on only 1,980 SMEs. This study, to enhance analytical effectiveness, reclassified the 20 business areas into eight sub-sectors of distribution, transportation, telecommunication, financial and insurance service, information technology, research and development, management consultancy, and media communication. This was also recently done by a World Bank survey for worldwide database of services policy. The Oslo Manual revised by the OECD(2005) emphasizes the importance of innovative activities of service and low-tech manufacturing industry. It further adds marketing and organizational innovations as two components of non-technological innovation. The definition of service innovation in this study also includes both technological and non-technological aspects. Theoretical argument and data analysis of this study show that most variables representing all firm, network, sector and institutional properties affected innovation performance of Korean service SMEs. Descriptive statistics show a relatively larger share of SMEs and weaker innovation performance in the service sector, vis-à-vis the manufacturing sector. Entrepreneurs thus far have been relying on more on imitation, rather than innovation when starting business. As a result, the growth of service SMEs had its limit: Their life span was relatively shorter than manufacturing SMEs and large enterprises. Innovative activities of service SMEs are more distributed on process innovation rather than product innovation, and are more distributed on non-technological innovation such as marketing and organization innovation, rather than technological innovation. However, the proportion of market-first innovation in whole innovation is larger than that of manufacturing sector, which implies that service innovation has recently been burgeoning as a new source of innovation. Just as support policies for innovation have not been as effective as in the manufacturing, so service firms have not implemented a system for rewarding innovators appropriately. In general, two sources lead the initiation for innovation in service SMEs : marketing experts and the network SMEs possess. Innovation lead by marketing experts occurs during the service delivery process. Networking with an external source is one of the main drivers for service innovation. Cross-tabulation analysis confirmed that innovation increases as firm size gets larger. The proportion of innovative firms in the large size category with more than 300 employees is 19.7%p and 36.1%p larger, respectively, than those of the medium size category with 100~300 employees and the small size category with less than 100 employees. Regarding export orientation, the level of innovation is largest for firms with low export proportion(55.6%), compared with firms with high share of export(43.2%) and no share at all(31.2%). Innovation activities of the knowledge and technology intensive services and business service industries are mostly vigorous. From the regression analysis, a few determinants such as firm, network, sector, and institutional properties are proved to affect innovation performance in the Korean service SME sector. For the logistic regression analysis, independent variables include firm properties (ratio of number of full-time workers to industrial average(firm size), number of full-time workers with an MA or higher degree(%) (MA degree), number of full-time workers being exclusively dedicated to R&D activities(%) (R&D staff), intensity of IT investment, compensation system), network properties (network, share of export in sales (export), share of FDI in equity capital(FDI)), sector properties (required level of expertise for service delivery, product life cycle), and institutional properties (importance of innovation support policy). Dependent variables are whole, technological, and non-technological innovation. The regression model turns out to be significant at the 1% of significance level. Most of the independent variables are significantly affecting three categories of innovation performance. Exceptions are MA degree, export, and R&D staff. MA degree does not exert any influence on performance of any category of innovation. R&D staff does not affect non-technological innovation. Export seems to have a non-linear relationship with the innovation performance. Noticeably important implications for preparing SME policy for the service industry can be drawn from these analyses. SME policy should focus on both the promoting determinants such as firm, network, and sector properties as well as reinforcing framework conditions of institutions and policies. As in any other business firms, firm-related factors such as differentiation and competitiveness are the most important determinants that affect growth of service firms. Because these determinants are truly endogenous to the firm, service SMEs should make their own efforts to foster the level of firm-related factors. Thus SME policy should be more focused on the sector, network and institutional factors. However, several firm-related factors need to be taken care of by SME policies. Institutional bottlenecks blocking growth of SMEs toward medium or large enterprises should be removed. SMEs are to be encouraged to increase information technology investment and to set up compensation systems for innovation efforts. Due to the externality of education and training, the government also needs to put more resources on fostering service talents. As for the sector factor: considering the diverse nature of service industry, SME policy on the service sector should be sector-specific to be effective. In some cases, policy support needs to be concentrated on knowledge intensive industries. Policy efforts would be very helpful in such fields as training experts related to service delivery and generic technology fields including information technology for the rapid innovation especially in the areas of which competition is fierce and life cycle is short. As for the development of the service industry, high quality human capital is absolutely crucial. Regarding the institutional factor, fostering human capital for the service industry is necessary focusing on global capacity and multi-skilled personnel. Supporting service-oriented research, education of service science, promoting service education courses in MBA programs, and building information and global infrastructure of the service SMEs are pressing tasks for SME policy. In addition, promoting the commercialization of innovation results, it is recommended to reinforce innovation financing, reforming sector-specific regulations, and improvement of intellectual property institution. Professional service areas such as legal and accounting, management consultancy and advertisement are absorbing high quality manpower but their innovation performances are not sufficient. Therefore policy measures to expedite regulation reform including removing entry barrier and preemptive market opening. Removing sector-specific regulatory barriers and opening market for foreign firms are essential to develop the service industry. In this respect, the 2008 OECD’s recommendations to the Korean government to remove hurdles especially in telecommunication, finance, and business service sectors may carry significant implications for the further development of the service industry in Korea.