earticle

영어

As global competition is increasing and enterprise environment is rapidly changing in the aftermath of the development of information and communications, many companies have recognized the necessity to sustain innovation. To enable such innovation activities, many companies are trying to utilize startups' entrepreneurial culture in order to quickly adjust to the changes and enter new markets. 'Entrepreneurial orientation' is recognized as a decision making strategy of entrepreneurship in existing companies. Many prior studies have proven that entrepreneurial orientation has positive influence on companies' performance. Based on the 5 dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, autonomy), this study aims to examine how their influence on companies' performance changes in accordance with the change in the flow of 'knowledge', knowledge creation process and open innovation, taking as moderating variables. Knowledge creation process, a circulation of new knowledge in a organization, is composed of 'socialization', 'externalization', 'internalization' and 'combination'. Open innovation is a paradigm in which firms should use external ideas and resources to innovate with partners by sharing risk and rewards. Using survey data from Korean small and medium enterprises(SMEs), the result of our analysis is as follows. First, entrepreneurial orientation influenced companies' performance positively as previous studies have shown. In terms of subordinate dimensions, innovativeness and proactiveness proved to be positively related to companies' performance. Second, knowledge creation process had beneficial influence on proactiveness. Third, open innovation had a positive moderating effect on proactiveness and a negative one on innovativeness. The results of our study show that entrepreneurial orientation dimensions can change independently and that companies wishing to improve their performance through strengthening entrepreneurial orientation can gain understanding on what they need to focus on. Except for proactiveness, knowledge creation process proved not to be statistically a significant moderating factor. That means that the role of knowledge in Korean firms are still limited and most of Korean SMEs are focusing on short term innovation activities such as cost saving, growing productivity, etc. In case of open innovation, previous study has shown that active innovative activities with external resources negatively influence the internal innovative activities in an organization, Therefore two kinds of innovative activities can be inconsistent with each other in the firms that has limited resource. On the other hand, as proactiveness has a strong relationship on entering new markets and searching new opportunities, it appears that it needs to use external resource and ideas for doing that effectively. We were able to confirm that proactive enterprises wishing to catch new opportunities and advance into new market need to create and share knowledge internally, and to cooperate with external sources in order to improve performance.