우리 나라 중소기업의 기술집약화: 성공의 함정

This study examines the critical success factors for the transformation of the Korean SMEs into more technology-intensive ones, using a model of 'success trap' which can be defined as the organizational pathology that leads to mismatching of organizational competence with changed environmental conditions in the long run, because myopic rationalities of firms make themselves stick to the prior core competence for a short-term performance. Based on in-depth case studies on 33 technological development projects from 9 SMEs, this study found that; 1) successful transformation into technology-intensive SMEs requires the exploration type of technology development projects; 2) the exploration type of technology development projects tends to have longer period of development time and to show lower success rate than the exploitation type of development projects; 3) initial idea of exploration type of projects comes from outside sources such as customers or technical experts, rather than from internal sources; 4) the exploration type of development projects are usually attempted when the performance level of SMEs are good and top management has a will to do against organizational resistance from the stakeholders, and; 5) SMEs tend to rely on external technological capabilities and to change organizational systems to successfully implement the exploration type of development projects. These results offer several theoretical and managerial implications for technological capability learning of SMEs in Korea.