패널구조방정식을 활용한 IT기업의 R&D투자효과 연구: 특허 매개효과 중심으로

This study analyzes not only the direct impact of R&D investment on corporate growth for 578 private firms in 2007-2016, but also whether corporate innovation activities play a role as a mediating parameter between R&D investment and corporate growth. For this purpose, we classify companies into IT and non-IT companies and measure the mediating effect by dividing innovation activities into the number of registered patents, applied patents, and sum of them. In addition, this study is based on both the systemGMM which is considered to be effective in solving the endogenous problems caused by the cross-sectional analysis in previous studies and ML-SEM which is a new method recently, and then compares two results. According to the empirical results, innovation activities has a role as partly mediating parameter on sales growth in non-IT companies. On the other hands, in IT companies, the increase in R&D investment leads to a decrease in sales of the company, and the increase in innovation activities increases the sales of the company. However, it was confirmed that IT companies also had positive effects by adjusting the lag of the R&D. In other words, this suggests that securing patents is more important than R&D investment for direct sales growth of IT companies. It is also evidence that immediate introduction of technology is necessary to respond to the speed of technological change since the cycle time of technologies of the IT field is relatively shorter compared to that of other fields.