우리나라 중소제조기업의 영업비밀 사용 요인에 관한 연구: 인력을 중심으로

Trade secrecy and patents are the two most widely used intellectual property (IP) protection mechanisms. Despite the plethora of research on patents, relatively few studies have examined firms’ decisions on trade secrecy, largely because these are not suited for empirical observation. This study examines the factors affecting South Korean small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises’ use of trade secrecy, focusing on R&D (upstream) and marketing (downstream) manpower. The findings suggest that the choice to use a non-disclosure agreement was positively related to R&D manpower, but negatively to marketing manpower. This study highlights that upstream and downstream manpower can have opposite influences on IP protection mechanism choices. This finding suggests that prior work’s demarcation of upstream and downstream capabilities provides a useful insight on the choices of IP protection mechanisms. This study shows that a firm’s manpower can potentially alter the bundled use of IP protection mechanisms, contributing to the intersection of human capital and value capture mechanism literature.