As global competition is being intensified and the paradigm shifts rapidly, technological innovation becomes more important. Accordingly, the age of knowledge informationization has come, it has become important for companies to secure competitiveness...
As global competition is being intensified and the paradigm shifts rapidly, technological innovation becomes more important. Accordingly, the age of knowledge informationization has come, it has become important for companies to secure competitiveness of technological innovation and acquire intangible assets. In particular, venture firms face the challenge of achieving the most effective management in the most efficient ways for technological innovation. Therefore, venture firms should concentrate on technological innovation to secure competitiveness and contribute to the growth and performance.
This study aims to empirically analyze the effect of technological innovation competencies on venture performance. This sets the variables to investigate not only technological innovation competencies, but also entrepreneurial characteristics and technological innovation performance on firm productivity. Technological innovation competencies are defined as R&D competency and external network competency. R&D competency is determined by variables as R&D investment and R&D manpower, and external network competency is the number of external collaborations. Entrepreneurial characteristics have variables as education level, past experience of start-up, and years of industry experience. Technological innovation performance is determined by the number of patents.
In this study, the linear regression analysis is performed using the Cobb-Douglas production function theory to determine the effect of each variable on the productivity of the venture firms. This study was conducted using the sample data of the “2015 Survey of Korea Venture Firms” report issued by the Small & Medium Business Administration. This study conducted an empirical analysis on 898 venture companies that were established in 2004 to 2014 and have experienced R&D investment in the whole sample.
In this study, three models were set up and analyzed. <Model 1> analyzed the effect of total measurement on productivity. <Model 2> has the comparison analysis between companies based on whether or not they were engaged in external network activities. <Model 3> is analyzed by adding moderating variables in model 1 to see the interaction between technological innovation performance and venture growth stage.
The empirical results of the three models are summarized as follows. First, the R&D competency and external network competency, which are technological innovation competencies have no significant effect or negative effect on productivity. Second, the effect of entrepreneurial characteristics on productivity is different according to external cooperation activities. Third, technological innovation performance has a positive effect on productivity according to the stage of venture growth.
The limitations of this study are as follows. There is a limit to figure out the relationship between only the quantitative measurement and productivity of venture firms. First of all, characteristics of the venture business are inevitable to bias the sample. Also, concrete analysis was difficult with only simple measurements.
Second, due to the characteristics of different venture companies, it is difficult to obtain consistent results on the whole data. Therefore, it is necessary to define the cluster of venture companies such as industry group and growth stage. In addition, it is expected that more sophisticated research can be carried out with the qualitative research.
Despite these limitations, the main implications of the study are as follows. First, this study economically analyzed the relationship between technological innovation competencies, entrepreneurial characteristics and venture productivity. Second, since the industrial experience of entrepreneur is important to the productivity of the company, it is suggested that strengthening the entrepreneurial competence can be a base for improving the technological innovation competencies of the venture firm. Third, it is suggested that venture firms should play a role properly in the stage of growth rather than too much effort for innovation outcomes.