포항공과대학교

초록/요약

It goes without saying that the technology innovation plays an important role in the sustainable growth of the firm in the global economy. It, however, is not easy to follow this simple and obvious sentence because there are a lot of barriers hindering firms from doing innovation activities, which consequently lets them lose their competitiveness in the market. Strategic R&D collaboration is considered as the way to solve this problem for the firm in that it shares the risks with partners that cannot be solved on its own and complements the resources that do not exist inside the firm. In this paper, KIS (Korean Innovation Survey) 2005 and KIS 2008, which were surveyed by STEPI (Science and Technology Policy Institute), are used to confirm the hypotheses that firms select different R&D collaboration partner because they face different innovation barriers and have different capabilities and resources. The result shows that, in the case of Korean manufacturing firms, they do not pursue the strategic R&D collaboration actively to overcome the barriers hindering them from doing innovation activities. In particular, small and mid-sized companies do not have the strategy to conduct the collaboration successfully, even though it is necessary for them to survive and grow up in the competition. Therefore, this paper contends that firms, especially SMEs, should prepare for the R&D collaboration strategy to remove the innovation barriers, which finally leads them to acquire the competitiveness.