تغییر الگوی نوآور بودن SME از طریق مدل کسب و کار جهانی شدن

Globalization has forced small and medium enterprises to change business models with new innovative capabilities. However, it is not clear what those old and new business models are let alone capabilities. Challenging this, we suggest a way of identifying principal types of those business models, and of finding evolving paths of SME's business models with the changing pattern of innovativeness. Based on a survey result of 400 Korean SMEs, four principal types of business models are identified and characterized by distinctive innovativeness. Also, through interviews and additional surveys on 30 globalized SMEs, the four evolving paths of SME's BMs are explored. For small and medium enterprises, our research can be used not only as a strategic reference, but also as a policy tool to design government-funded supporting programs.

Recently, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been regarded as the engine of economic growth and employment. As the growth of industry giants have been slowing, the role of SMEs becomes more important. Actually, Korean SMEs have increased their share both of exports and imports over last decade, and are expected to keep doing so as the driving forces of economic growth and technological innovation. [1]. Led by the Small & Medium Business Administration (SMBA), Korean SMEs definitely play a pivotal role in the national economic growth, accounting for 99.9% of all enterprises (about 3 million SMEs), 87.7% of all employees (13.1 million employees), and 49.4% of total production in 2009 [2]. To boost national innovation and economic growth, it is crucial to drive SMEs' innovation. Despite various suggestions, there is a consensus that innovation should depend on a firm's innovativeness, in other words, the capability to introduce new processes, products, ideas, etc. [3] and [4] At the outset, innovativeness was defined from various perspectives, but recently is conceptualized as ‘strategies and actions that the firm may undertaken in order to actualize corporate orientation and goals’ [4]. The focus has made a shift from a traditional mix of product and process innovation to a market-oriented strategic process. As for SMEs, the basic definition is same, but responsiveness to changing economic and technological landscape is emphasized [5] and [6]. Considering these, we can define SME's innovativeness as ever-changing environment-responsive strategies and actions to achieve corporate goals. A number of studies have suggested a variety of key determinants on SME's innovativeness, and further investigate how those affect SME's business and innovation performance [4], [7] and [8]. Some studies try to bringing together determinants in a systematic manner. Notably, Keizer, Dijkstra and Halman build taxonomy, suggesting that key determinants could be classified into those internal and external [9]. External variables cover all the opportunities SMEs can seize from a surrounding environment, including variables such as ‘Collaboration with other firms’, ‘Linkage with knowledge centers’, ‘Utilizing financial resources or support regulations’, and others. Among external variables, recent studies have found that collaboration with other players such as suppliers, business partners or customers should become more important for SMEs' innovation [10], [11], [12] and [13]. Focusing on knowledge acquisition and sharing, some studies argue that the linkage with knowledge centers which stimulate university-SME technology/knowledge transfer be also a key factor, emphasizing the role of bridging institutions [10] and [14]. Finally, another consensus is that most SMEs have difficulty in financing. That is why R&D funding availability, government subsidies and supporting regulation are regarded as important factors [13] and [14]. To the opposite, internal variables include characteristics of SMEs and government policies for SMEs. Those can be roughly divide into ‘Strategy’, ‘Structure’, ‘Technology policy’, ‘Level of education’ and ‘Investments in R&D’ categories. Typical managerial factors such as organizational structure or corporate strategy have also been studied [16] and [17]. It is worthy of mentioning some previous efforts as follows. Birchall, Chanaron and Soderquist and Carrier suggest that the appropriate strategy could stimulate both internal creativity and risk-taking behavior [10] and [18]. Hoffman et al. also find that strategic factors like marketing involvement have contributed a lot to successful innovation [14]. Larson, Gobeli & Grey and Meer et al. examined the relationship between management structures and innovation activities, suggesting the importance of appropriate structure [19] and [20]. Oerlemans, Meeus and Boekema argue that technology policy should have bearing on firm's innovativeness [12] and [15]. Recently, Radas and Bozic stress the importance of market factors such as international market presence [7]. So far, looking into determinants, it is notable that those are composed of SME's structures and strategic behaviors to be more responsive to external opportunities than as it was. Although several taxonomies and concepts have been suggested, the business model (BM) is one of the most appropriate to bring those together in a systematic manner. Above all, BM constitutes a holistic concept, encompassing most of above-mentioned elements that build the anatomy of a firm's core logic for value creation and appropriation [21], [22] and [23]. Further, recent studies argue that the BM should be a key driver of innovation, allowing entrepreneurs to identify opportunities and thus to bring innovation into existence [24] and [25]. Put simply, BM is not only a system of innovation, but a way of doing innovation. Also, the focus lies on responsiveness to seize opportunities from market and technological change which is SME's innovativeness itself. Thus, BM is better at explaining any SME's innovation rather than some of above-mentioned elements. That is why we use BM as a framework to explain SME's innovation. Thus, this paper aims to identify principal types of SME's BMs, understand how these BMs are composed of, analyze what kinds of innovation BMs drive, and thus to explain SME's innovation in terms of BM. As for Korean SMEs, one thing to note is the effect of globalization. Recent study reports that the globalization should have forced Korean SMEs to develop a variety of global-level capabilities, and contributed a lot to enhancing innovativeness [26]. Under the condition of a saturated domestic market and global companies' penetration, SMEs cannot help competing with global leaders in a global market. Another thing to note is that BM of any company goes through transformation, augmentation, extension or evolution to sustain competitiveness [27]. Considering these, we also try to finding several paths of developing global BMs.

SME's innovation is crucial for economic growth of any country. Although it is evident that innovation should depend on innovativeness, the problem comes from the fact that there are too many determinants and influencing factors on innovativeness. To overcome this, SME's innovativeness has been investigated on the assumption that some key factors should exist. A number of studies have tackled this issue, and identified several internal and external factors. However, those factors are just listed, but are not integrated into a system where the role and intensity of such factors can become obvious. Considering both conceptual comprehensiveness and flexibility, we adopt the concept of BM, select key BM components, reduce those to three dimensions and create the BM space for Korean SMEs. Then, a survey on Korean SMEs is made and analyzed. It makes us identify four principal types of SME's BMs, and understand how each BM is characterized by key BM components such as capabilities, strategies and responsiveness to globalization. Further, through an additional survey on 30 global SMEs for snap-shot comparison, the past and present SMEs are projected on the innovation plane, enabling us to identify four evolving paths of SMEs. Analytic results support the idea that globalization has forced SME's BM to evolve showing a specific pattern of changing innovativeness. Many SMEs are struggling to get out of a domestic market, and thus stick to a global infant BM without any global competitiveness. Contrastingly, some SMEs respond actively to the globalization, and develop new BMs. Four evolving paths with different changing patterns of innovativeness are identified. Despite high risk, some boost disruptive innovation led by R&D-oriented strategy. A half of SMEs make efforts to minimize the risk, and thus push incremental innovation focusing on a mix of low cost and high quality. Against these gradual paths, a small number of SMEs undergoes a sudden change. Born-to-be-global SMEs, from the outset, aim at becoming global SMEs by developing both innovation capabilities actively. Finally, there is a path along which SMEs jump from a domestic player to a global player. As industry giants face the growth limitation, many countries such as Korea regard SMEs as new growth engines, and set various policies in motion to increase the number of global leading SMEs. Without any systematic guide of SME's evolution through globalization, doubts cannot help being cast continuously both on effectiveness and efficiency of SME policies lopsided on R&D funding. In that regard, our study can serve as a semi-customized policy tool for SMEs with different types of BMs, and thus contributes to improve relevant SME policies. Above all, it guides policymakers in identifying the most appropriate way to support SMEs with different BMs. SMEs with global infant BMs cannot decide which innovation to push because they have little knowledge about global markets and competitors. Of great help is a policy program to collect such information and to guide how to develop innovation capability. SMEs pushing disruptive innovation usually suffer from R&D investment shortage, thus need public R&D funding enough to work their way. Once R&D is completed, due to weak marketing capability, they also need a policy support for foreign market development. SMEs focusing on incremental innovation should get a consistent support because they need more time than others. A break of support is likely to hurt them more than others. Our method can also act as a strategic tool for SMEs. It can give the prognosis both on current innovative position and BM, and thus help SMEs find the most appropriate strategic path of globalization and new BM development. Despite the value of findings, our study has several limitations, and thus room for further studies. First and foremost, we did not examine the causal relationship between BM components, and thus can predict neither synergy nor confliction between those when investment is made on a certain component. Under budget constraint, SMEs are eager to maximize the return on investment. Thus, if the causal relationship becomes obvious, it will contribute a lot to enhance the value of our approach. Another problem comes from the industry-wise difference. A way of developing R&D capability should vary across industries, implying implicitly that a guide of developing the next BM should be customized to a specific industry. Last but not least, as for data and methodology, this study is not free from a biased sample problem in terms of sample size, selection, etc., and also cannot examine the historical evolving paths of SMEs enough at an acceptable granularity of time-series data.