This dissertation investigates and differentiations of firm's competencies and innovative performance between innovative SMEs and non-innovative SMEs.
For this research objective, I analyze the empirical survey via questionnaire from 275 firms in manufacturing industry in Daegu and Kyeungbook region.
The empirical research model comprised of six competencies - CEO skill, entrepreneurship, financial resource, technological resource, human resource, and organizational resource - and two innovative performance that included profit and competitive advantage.
The results are as follows:
First, the key resource of profit are financial resource such as capital stability and human resource focused on R&D manpower. Especially the effects of financial resource have the largest on the profit in innovative oriented small-medium firms.
Second, technology and organizational cohesiveness have the significant effect on the product competitiveness.
Third, market competitiveness has been determined by the technology and human resource.
Forth, innovative SMEs has higher value than general firms in terms of financial and organizational resource, and all of innovative performance.
The study has following implications. First, the promotion policy of innovative oriented SMEs such as venture and inno-biz has significant impact on the forcing industrial competitiveness. Second, unlike traditional organizational economics, RBV perspective support strongly in the performance of innovative oriented SMEs. Third, the importance of profit has rationalized in the sustainable competitive advantage also in the innovative oriented SMEs.
Finally this study has some limitation in methodological and theoretical aspects. It has limits to generalize the empirical results due to regional limited sample from the specific city. So it requires to extend the sample from the national covering in the future studies. Next this study has not included a lot of prior research reviewed variables in each dimensions - for example leadership of CEO, the background characteristics etc. In the future studies needs to explore these kinds of variables.