중국 시장에서 서비스 혁신과 4차 산업혁명 기술의 연계: 빅데이터와 스마트 주문을 중심으로

Since it is suggested by a very distinguished scholar in the history of economics, J. Schumpeter, ‘innovation,’ which means making effort to try to look at something in different angles and to change existing thing in different ways instead of following existing ways blindly, has been thought of as one important source of competitive advantage for companies. Innovation concept has been applied to and coceptualized as service innovation and there have been many researches about it. Service innovation can be divided into four categories of service innovation as new service interfaces, new concepts of service, new technological options and new types of service delivery. Recently sustainability, the role of social media and digitalization are added as new categories to reflect changes in business environment and society. Nowadays a new stream of technological developments is emerging based on ICT and intelligent types of technologies and they are called ‘Industry 4.0’ technologies. They include big data analytics, AI(artificial intelligence), drones, self driving car, smart order or O2O, smart home, block chain, cloud computing and so on and can be thought to be a new sources of corporate competitive advantage. There have been a lot of independent researches on service innovation and Industry 4.0 technologies related to corporate performance but it is very hard to find researches on the relationship between service innovation and Industry 4.0 technologies. We paid attention on this situation and designed two-step research model. Our first research was focused on verifying if implementation of service innovation affects positively on corporate performance based on survey results from companies located in China which has big market and, as a result, has higher value or possibility of representation as samples. Our second goal for this study was to check whether the effort of companies on big data analytics and on smart order among many Industry 4.0 technologies have positive moderating effect on the relationship between service innovation and performances respectively. As the results, we would find relationships among service innovation and Industry 4.0 technologies to improve corporate performance and to offer managers some insights to get ahead in fierce competition over ever-changing business environment. As the result of conducting surveys relying on questionnaire on 339 Chinese companies, we could verify that implementing service innovation show positive effect on the performance of companies, which allows our first research goal to be achieved. In the second step of our empirical study, we found that the effort on implementing smart order technology has positive moderating effect on the relationship, while the effort on implementing big data analytics does not. These results provides managers with the implications that companies have to make effort to implement service innovation and smart order technology simultaneously to improve performance more and better, and that the effort of implementing big data analytics does not offer that kind of synergistic effect. These results imply managerial implications that smart order contributes on performance of companies like sales improvements directly and immediately, while big data analytics does indirectly and over longer time span because it is a technology which produce values from collected data.