Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea have experienced declining commercialization success rates, despite the substantial R&D investment as input. Regarding the challenge, scholars and policymakers have started to devote attention to the ...
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea have experienced declining commercialization success rates, despite the substantial R&D investment as input. Regarding the challenge, scholars and policymakers have started to devote attention to the role of demonstration that links R&D and commercialization in the commercialization performance. Based on the phenomena and discourse, we aim to analyze the relationship between the SMEs’ technological capabilities, demonstration capabilities, and their technology commercialization performance with the pooled data of 「Survey on Technology of SMEs」 2018-2020. Specifically, we conceptualize the technological capabilities as technological novelty and patent grants and demonstration capabilities as the ability to conduct prototype evaluation and test internally, respectively. And then from the regression analysis, we found that the interaction effect between technological and demonstration capabilities positively relates to commercialization performance. We also observed that the findings are more significant for the technological novelty of ‘Korea-first’ and Mid-High Tech. and High Tech. sectors in the domestic market. We contribute to the discussion that demonstration capability plays an important role in SMEs' technology commercialization performance. We also suggest that the interaction effect between technological and demonstration capabilities is not sufficient for the performance under the circumstances characterized as the novelty of ‘World-first’ and overseas market and correspondingly, propose relevant marketing activities for the market.