강소기업 R&D 인력 교육훈련의 핵심성공요인

Abstract

A small giant business called Hidden Champion produces values through continued research and development for new markets. In industry, they also gain technical advantages which are hard to be mimicked by other competitive in Korea so that they provide a lot of implications for domestic small and medium business. Since the concept of small giant business was emerged in industry, it has actively been developed to be studied in Korea, but it has been mainly focused on the limited area such as ‘finding new market’, ‘marketing strategy,’ and ‘success factors.’ For this reason, the empirical research for the development of R&D workforce, a key for a small giant business, is insufficient. This study was conducted to identify the key success factors of the R&D workforce development which are essential to get technical competitiveness for small giant businesses through successful R&D training and development of small giant businesses in Korea. This research was conducted based on the following procedures : 1) successful small giant businesses were select according to the outstanding performance of technical development among domestic small and medium businesses; 2) in-depth analysis was conducted about training and development systems of the selected small giant businesses; and 3) key success factors of R&D workforce development were drawn. The research employed a CIPP model as an analysis framework and drew hypothetical success factors of each context, inputs, process, and outputs through a review of literature. First of all, we conducted literature review and drew effective variables of training and development of small and medium-sized businesses that were identified as internal and external environment, task of trainees, internal characteristics of trainees and training programs factors. In this study, we empirically verified the effective variables that were mainly focused on the external environment of company and training programs factors except the internal characteristics of trainees, which were less relevant to the factors of company. The data were collected through a sample of 236 small giant business selected among domestic 4 institutes. We selected 85 companies that had a higher R&D budget per sales rather than those with an industrial average, because we supposed that those companies with bigger investment in R&D would put more budgets in training and development of R&D workforce. We selected top 50 companies for a number of researchers who were registered in the Korea Industrial Technology Association (KOITA) because we supposed that the best practices of development and training of companies would be gathered more likely if the companies had enough R&D workforce. Among the selected 50 companies, we introduced ourselves to the company managers and asked for an interview the employees of the companies through phone calls and e-mails, and conducted the in-depth interviews for 11 companies which allowed us to find training and development of R&D workforce. The interviews were conducted on 11 trainers and 4 research directors of R&D department of 11 companies. According to this research, we drew 9 propositions in terms of training and development of R&D workforce. The significant factors of R&D training and development performance among 9 propositions were support of CEO, continuous learning culture, learning incentive system, usage of in-house trainers in company, informal learning, and following up service of learning. Based on the research result, several policy implications were suggested to support R&D training and development of small and medium companies in Korea. The suggestions to improve the performance of R&D training and development of small and medium-sized companies are as follows:First, in terms of learning method, informal learning that uses internal resources of organizations such as company academy, seminar, meeting, and knowledge sharing is effective for improving the performance of training and development. Regarding training and development system, learning incentive system and follow-up service of learning are effective for improving the performance of training and development. Moreover, the support of CEO and continuous learning culture will be helpful to improve performance of training and development in the organizational culture. Second, the investment of training and development, the planning of training and development, and the evaluation of training and development are not included in the hypothetical success factors. This implies that they are not critical success factors to conduct successful training and development, but essential factors to make training and development successful. Third, R&D organizational features and R&D cycle will affect the strength of informal learning and they will be considered when empirical R&D research is conducted. Furthermore, this research provides implications of policy for establishing small and medium companies. First of all, in order to maximize the uses of human resources in small and medium businesses, it is necessary to support the system for developing in-house trainers. In addition, the learning incentive system that can have a positive effect on R&D training and development should be supported at the corporate level policy. The results of this research provide directions for future research. First, in this research, the success factors of R&D training and development of small giant companies were drawn by the responses of interviewees. Therefore, future research may identify a causal relationship between R&D training and development and the performance of companies. Second, this research findings were based on the result of the survey to 238 small giant companies so that the result could be hard to apply for all small giant businesses. In this sense, an interesting avenue for future research is to conduct surveys to every small giant business to have he results to be generalized. Third, the in-depth interview was conducted for HRD directors in small giant companies in this research. Therefore, in order to maximize the effect of the result of interview, future research may carry out more interviews of participants who attended successful R&D training program, and further study can identify key success factors through SCM (Success Case Method).