earticle

영어

It is well known that dealing with technical aspects of new product idea is a core role to R&D. On the other hand, the core role of salespeople is to sell product or share customer's technological needs to R&D people who are in charger of developing products. Although salespeople in high technology is also contributing by technological information and knowledge sharing, existing studies have not shown enough of factors which give positive effect on innovative activity in technology innovation process so far. So, the main goal of this study is to find out what factors can give positive effect on innovative activity. This study has been done by empirical study examining 121 semi-conductor salespeople in Korea. Several factors were also inspected which give positive impact on innovative activity like generation of technological idea for product. The first is salespeople's competence(prior knowledge) and it gives positive impact on generation of technological idea for product. The second is salespeople's informal R&D activity and it also gives positive impact on generation of technological idea for product. The contribution of this study is that it is clearly showed for salespeople to involve in technology innovation process. Especially, salespeople's informal R&D activity gives positive effect on innovative activity is the most important study result. In addition, by extending the domain of R&D and applying it to salespeople, it was verified there is a positive causality between salespeople and innovative activity. So, further studies on innovative activities played by salespeople in technology innovation process are needed.