No abstract

Abstract:This paper aims to analyze the influence of the technological diversification on a firm's innovation capabilities and investigates the effect of various strategies on the firm's financial performance in a technology-oriented environment. We employ the entropy measurement to calculate technological diversification with 2095 patents, which are applied from years 2009 to 2011 by 507 firms that have participated in Korean government Information Technology (IT) Research and Development (R&D) supporting programs. In our framework, a firm should not diversify among the related technology fields, but should concentrate on a specific technology to reinforce the competitive advantage. However, in the case of the firms with sufficient resources, increasing technological diversification among the unrelated technology fields plays a key role on the firms' performance. Furthermore, the degree of the technological diversification should be adjusted dynamically in compliance with the change of a firm's innovation capabilities. Therefore, these results suggest that a firm should develop differentiated competitiveness through specialization by prioritizing its capabilities, and then exploit unrelated technological diversification to search for new opportunities.

The semiconductor industry is experiencing a rapid change since new markets and new technologies have emerged to give insights to product innovation. The semiconductor industry is now specializing into the integrated device manufacturer (IDM), fabless, and foundry sectors. We investigated the determinant factors that affect the financial performance of firms in the fabless sector, which is the most technology-intensive and product-oriented sector among the three sectors. The correlation among technological capability, product platform, and financial performance is analyzed by structural equation modeling. The data includes 17,256 patents from 2005 to 2014 and financial data from 2012 to 2016 from 57 firms that run businesses in the fabless sector. Specifically, technological capability includes technological assets, technology breadth, and technology depth. New product development occurs by applying product platform efficiency. Financial performance includes growth and profitability. The results show that advancing product platform efficiency brings positive effects to financial performance. Also, increasing technological depth and technological assets not only improve product platform efficiency, but also bring positive effects to financial performance. In addition, technological depth affected growth positively, and technological breadth affected profitability positively. The results show the direction that new product development strategy needs to take.

No abstract