기업의 조직문화, 흡수역량, 혁신능력과의 관계: 첨단기술 벤처기업에 대한 실증연구

Innovation capability is considered as the prerequisite tool for many enterprises to enhance their productivity. Recently, the importance of Innovation capability as a tool for retaining the competitive advantage keeps growing. While most enterprises are currently seeking well equipped innovation capability, they are not good at creating the culture for facilitating the absorptive capacity and innovation capability. To improve the innovation capability, we propose that organizational culture affects absorptive capacity and innovation capability and, in sequence, the absorptive capacity affects innovation capability in Hi-tech venture enterprises. To test the above propositions, data were collected from a sample of 131 hi-tech venture enterprises in Daedeok Innopolis, the largest and oldest R&D cluster in Korea. In general, absorptive capacity was found as the intervening variable between organizational culture and innovation capability. In addition, organizational culture had a positive effect on absorptive capacity. More managerial implications and brief conclusions were as follows. First, our study suggests that absorptive capacity has a significant positive effect on innovation capability, indicating that absorptive capacity plays an important role in the development of a firm’s innovation capability. Thus, the higher absorptive capacity, the higher innovation capability. As predicted in the hypotheses, the research results also reveal that organization culture has a significant positive effect on absorptive capacity. This is an important finding since it varies from prior studies that treat absorptive capacity as an exogenous variable. Our study finds that organizational culture can both develop and increase a firm’s absorptive capacity. Absorptive capacity can benefit an organization by integrating external knowledge and then transforming it into the firm’s competence. This ability is part of learning oriented organization culture and is the basis of the firm creating sustainable competitive advantages. The research results show that absorptive capacity is the mediating variable between organizational culture and innovation capability, acting as a bridge between the two variables. This means that if absorptive capacity is inadequate, then the organizational culture in a firm will have less direct effect on the firm’s innovation capability. However, if the organizational culture can increase the firm’s absorptive capacity, it may have a significant effect on the firm’s innovation capacity. The completely mediating model found in this study indicates that absorptive capacity is a key strategic factor in improving a firm’s product and procedure innovation capability.