earticle

영어

Exporting to firms has been identified as a fundamental and strategic way to enter into foreign markets. According to stage theory of internationalization suggested by Johanson and Vahlne (1977), a firm does exporting as the first strategy to enter into foreign markets and gradually expands foreign markets. Even though a firm goes to foreign markets by direct investing, it still do exporting. Therefore, the relationship between direct investment and exporting to a firm may be complementary. As a result, many studies have focused to find the determinants of exporting. In general, firm innovation has been largely acknowledged as a crucial factor in a strategic aspect in Korean small and medium sized firms. Although Korean small and medium sized firms have limited resources, they tend to improve firm innovation to survive rapidly changing business environments in various foreign markets. Using 305 small and midium sized Korean venture firms listed on KOSDAQ over the periods from 1999 to 2010, this study examine the effect of firm innovation on export. In general, R&D expenditure can’t be a proper proxy variable for firm innovation. Unlike the previous studies, this study tried to investigate the effect of firm innovation on export, using innovation performance of firms from a Cobb-Douglas function. The empirical results indicate that firm innovation is positively associated with export. And the same results were shown when controlling for individual firm heterogeneity, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation of an error term, and firm innovation of the previous year. The empirical results mean in general that firms extending the process of foreign entry through export need to improve firm innovation. Although this study finds the positive association between firm innovation and export, there are problems in this study. First, this study only considers exporting of firms as one of the ways for foreign market entry. Even though Korean small and medium sized firms listed on KOSDAQ have a large portion of exporting, they could also consider other ways to enter into foreign markets. Therefore, it is needed to think about other ways to enter into foreign markets as well as exporting. Second, this study employs innovation performance made from a Cobb-Douglas function. In other words, this means we cannot know from where firm innovation performance is coming. Therefore, a future study which can be suggested should consider a multiple aspects of firm innovation. For example, OECD Olso Manual (2005) suggested four types of firm innovation such as product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, and organizational innovation. Accordingly, it is needed to examine the relationship between an individual type of firm innovation and exporting in a future study, if the related data are available. This direction of a future study can tell which effort for innovation is required to firms.

한국어

기업의 혁신은 기업의 전략 측면에서 중요한 요인으로 간주되어 오고 있다. 국내 중소기업들은 자원의 한계에 직면해 있음에도 불구하고, 해외진출을 통하여 기업의 성과를 달성하고 있다. 본 연구는 1999년부터 2010년까지 코스닥(KOSDAQ)에 상장된 305개의 국내 중소기업들을 대상으로 기업의 혁신성과가 수출에 미치는 영향에 대해서 분석하였다. 일반적으로 기업의 혁신과 관련하여 R&D 지출이 대리변수로써 사용되어져 왔으나, R&D 지출은 혁신을 위한 투입요소이지 혁신의 직접적 대리변수가 될 수 없는 등의 한계점을 지니고 있다. 따라서 기존의 R&D를 사용한 연구와는 달리 콥-더글라스(Cobb-Douglas) 생산 함수로부터 혁신성과를 도출하여 국내 중소기업의 수출에 미치는 영향에 관하여 분석을 시도하였다. 실증 분석의 결과는 기업혁신이 수출에 유의적인 정(+)의 영향을 제공하고 있음을 제시하고 있다. 이러한 기업 혁신의 영향은 각 기업의 이질성, 오차항의 이분산과 자기상관성, 전년도의 기업의 혁신성과를 고려한 다양한 통계 기법을 사용하였을 때 역시 유의적인 양(+)의 영향을 미치고 있음을 보여주고 있다. 본 연구의 실증분석 결과로부터 수출을 통한 해외진입을 추구하는 기업들은 혁신성과를 향상시킬 필요가 있음을 시사하고 있다