A study of the SME Technology Roadmapping Program to strengthen the R&D planning capability of Korean SMEs

As many countries strive to bolster their respective economies and to minimize the repercussions of the global financial crisis, policies for strengthening the innovative capabilities of small and medium enterprises have emerged as an important means for pursuing these governmental efforts. In 2007, the Korean government designed its SME Technology Roadmapping Program to reinforce the planning capabilities of SMEs and began actively administering the program in 2008.This study analyzes the contents and effects of Korea's SME Roadmapping Support Program, which has yielded successful outcomes, for the purpose of illuminating various implications that can be learned from this program for future policies. Although the beneficiaries of Korea's support project were companies that are relatively smaller when compared to the participants in Singapore's OTR program, a greater amount of manpower and financial resources were devoted by Korea to build their mid-to-long term roadmaps. The SME technology roadmaps generated through the support of this program were found to have contributed to strengthening the capabilities of human resources, establishing mid-to-long term R&D strategies, developing technology, enhancing the success rate of commercialization, and identifying technology development projects.In addition, this study explores directions for improving the program by analyzing the results of a survey conducted among the companies that completed roadmaps as participants in the program. According to my analysis of the Structural Equation Model (SEM) constructed from the survey, the level of satisfaction regarding the program declined in cases where the roadmap presented technologies that required a long time for development. From this observation, we derived the lesson that in order to improve the SME Technology Roadmapping Program in the future, it will be necessary to reduce the timeframe of the roadmaps from the conventional 3~5 years to 2~3 years.

► The Korean government designed its TRMs to reinforce the capabilities of SMEs.
► Korea's SME Roadmapping Support Program has yielded successful outcomes.
► The Roadmapping Program will need to reduce the timeframe of its TRMs.
► This study will provide insights for those seeking to build SMEs' R&D roadmaps.