Abstract
Technology innovation and commercialization have been the cornerstone of South Korea’s remarkable economic development. In this paper, we argue that South Korea’s technology-based economic development is unsustainable without fundamental changes in its technology policy-making and implementation approaches. Developed countries’ systems of innovation (SI) operating at the technology frontier have increasingly embraced bottom-up technology policy, making them more reliant on cooperation among teams at the project level. Drawing on Social Interdependence Theory, this research finds that the intra-team dynamics of South Korea’s technology transfer and commercialization (TTC) process negatively impacts on not only current TTC projects, but also the transition of South Korean SI toward an integrative policy approach that fosters innovation and commercialization. It is clear that the top-down policy-making model supportive of linear models of innovation that South Korea has relied on for so long needs to be replaced. However, the current intra-team dynamics of TTC teams may continue to hinder this transition. While Korean TTC teams perceive themselves to be cooperative and effective in general, there is a pronounced lack of cathexis which undermines their cooperation. This may be an impediment to the success of technology commercialization teams and their projects. Further research is warranted to confirm this finding and explore the extent to which this problem hinders the sustained technology-led development of South Korea.
Highlights
In the long term, the capacity of a country to achieve sustainable economic development rests on its capability to adapt its innovation system [1,2]
In order to measure goal multiplicity, we have developed our own questions based on other survey items from [49,62]
A structured path analysis of the data collected from South Korean technology transfer and commercialization (TTC) teams against the research model developed for this study has, to a large degree, confirmed the hypotheses, but has raised some issues
Summary
The capacity of a country to achieve sustainable economic development rests on its capability to adapt its innovation system [1,2]. Traditional innovation and commercialization research has predominantly used neo-classical economic approaches to analyze policies, resources, productivity, inter-firm relationships and appropriation of technology investments in competitive settings, but they are not able to fully explain all the differences in the performance of NIEs [14,15]. In addressing this shortcoming, researchers have turned to evolutionary and institutional approaches in the study of technological capabilities, learning, knowledge accumulation and the transitions of NIEs [16,17], but even these approaches have their limitations. Section five concludes and extends the discussion on implications and further research
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