Geographic Information System(GIS) industry is one of the most important industries to realize an ubiquitous society in 21st century. Korean government pronounced this industry as strategically promoting industrial sectors and has invested huge amount...
Geographic Information System(GIS) industry is one of the most important industries to realize an ubiquitous society in 21st century. Korean government pronounced this industry as strategically promoting industrial sectors and has invested huge amount of money to provide industry infrastructures through 3 stages of National GIS(NGIS) projects. However, comparing to several advanced countries, Korean industries are far behind its development especially for related software engines and application systems. Therefore, it is required for Korean firms to catch up the global industry players and to find out the key determinants for international competitiveness.
Poter proposed a 'diamond model' of competitiveness in 1990. This model is more comprehensive than the traditional theories in considering determinants for competitiveness, but it is criticized mainly because the model is constructed on a home basis. In addition, the Porter's model is well suited in analyzing traditional manufacturing industries, but not well applied to newly emerging services industries such as GISindustry.
This study attempts to revise the Porter's model by introducing the government conditions as a key competition factor rather than considering as an exogenous variable. After operationalization of the model variables, model hypotheses are developed and 3 moderating variables ('Market development stage', 'Internationalization stage', 'Business areas') are also introduced. Factor conditions, Demand conditions, Supporting industries, Firm rivalry and Government policies are chosen as 5 independent variables. Sales amount per employees is found to be the most appropriate dependent variable by the result of analysis of variance. The study empirically tests the model's hypotheses for different groups of firms in Korean GISIndustry using methodologies of regression analysis, Kruskal-Wallace test and Mann-Whitney test.
The test results show that international variables, such as international markets and international rivalry, are found to be more important than domestic variables, contrary to the predictions of Porter's original model. This implies that the diamond model should be extended to incorporate a global scope. In addition, different sets of competition factors are derived with regard to the characteristics of above-mentioned 3 moderating variables. This means that different industry promotion tools should be introduced after reviewing the characteristics of the firms.
This study will be the first attempt to investigate the Korean GISindustry empirically and contribute to the related knowledge for academic societies and industry practitioners.