A study on technology development performance and technology commercialization performance according to the technology development capability of SMEs focusing on a comparative analysis of technology business groups

Abstract

Recently, a lot of small- and mid-sized companies have emerged through continuous technological development and start-up successes despite insufficient scales and resources compared to medium companies or conglomerates in fierce market competition. Technological development capability, which is required to acquire, select, or utilize source technology for company competitiveness, becomes the competitive edge and key capability to gain distinctiveness. Accordingly, the objective of this research was to investigate the influential factors on performance by suggesting technological development results and technology commercialization as the outcome of technological development capability and to identify the capability required for successful technological development performance and technology commercialization for companies through previous academic research. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate performance differences according to technology business groups by dividing the groups into high-technology companies, medium-technology companies, and low-technology companies. As a result of the analysis, among the indicators constituting technological development capability, manpower in technological development and technological development-specialized research centers had a positive influence on the product competitiveness of technological development performance. Also, technological development expenses and technology skill levels were verified to have positive impacts on the technology competitiveness of technological development performance. As for technology commercialization performance, the more manpower that is in research and development, the higher the sales amounts by technological development; also, the higher the technology skill levels, the higher the export amounts by technological development. Moreover, technology business groups had differences in performance. This research has significance in focusing on the influence of the technological development capability of companies on technological development performance and technology commercialization performance. Future research is expected to draw new variations different from the analysis results from existing studies by setting variations, investigating complementary relationships among variations in detail, and utilizing statistical techniques that can control mutual relationships among variations. © 2019 by the authors.