Earticle

New technology development capability plays a key role in making small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increase their innovation performance, such as in product or process innovation. To examine the influencing factors of SMEs' new technology development capability, this study empirically analyzes the mediating effects of SMEs' process design capability and product interior design capability on the positive association between their external information network diversity and new technology development capability. This study performs the ordinary least squares regression on a sample of 2,000 South Korean SMEs. Results reveal that SMEs' process design capability fully mediates, and product interior design capability partially mediates the positive association between the external information network diversity and new technology development capability.

Growth in the use of mobile commerce services (MCS) as an enabler to conduct business more effectively has been phenomenal. Technology acceptance model (TAM) has been applied in different contexts to examine a wide range of information technology. As more and more companies are finding ways to utilize MCS, an important issue is to understand what factors will affect the decisions of consumers in adopting the services. Based on TAM with two additional groups of external factors (i.e., service-related factors [ubiquitous access and contextual service] and technology-related factors [perceived security risk and network connectivity]) that are theoretically justified to affect both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, which are also considered, a research model for the investigated technology acceptance was developed and empirically examined. The major results of this study are as follows. First, ubiquitous access affects perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Contextual service affects perceived usefulness. Second, perceived security risk affects perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Finally, network connectivity affects perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.

According to the dynamic changes in the business environment, the structural transformation of firms has had an observable trend. An increasingly large number of firms have been transforming into either project-based organizations or project expert groups. This study aims to investigate the antecedents required for the optimal level of empowerment with consideration of the project-based team environmental nature and job characteristic. Three factors are applied to measure the significant effects on psychological empowerment as the result variables. To determine the antecedents and consequent factors of psychological empowerment, employees’ interviews and precedent studies are used. For the empirical study, four determinants of empowerment variables are modeled into a second-order reflective construct. This study finds that psychological empowerment significantly affects performance. Therefore, this study can serve as a guideline for development and operating methods for project success.

This research aims to examine the predictive power of multiple online stock message boards, namely, NAVER Finance and PAXNET, which are the most popular stock message boards in South Korea, in stock market activities. If predictive power exists, we then compare the predictive power of multiple online stock message boards. To accomplish the research purpose, we constructed a panel data set with close price, volatility, Spell out acronyms at first mention.PER, and number of posts in 40 companies in three months, and conducted a panel vector auto-regression analysis. The analysis results showed that the number of posts could predict stock market activities. In NAVER Finance, previous number of posts positively influenced volatility on the day. In PAXNET, previous number of posts positively influenced close price, volatility, and PER on the day. Second, we confirmed a difference in the prediction power for stock market activities between multiple online stock message boards. This research is limited by the fact that it only considered 40 companies and three stock market activities. Nevertheless, we found correlation between online stock message board and stock market activities and provided practical implications. We suggest that investors need to focus on specific online message boards to find interesting stock market activities.

This study determines whether or not firms can achieve high productivity growth through external technology acquisition. It also identifies the key factors affecting adopting firms’ productivity growth by employing the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) methodology, which features computational ease, low data dependency, and decomposition of productivity growth into technical efficiency change and technical change. Results showed that the effects of productivity growth arising from technology transfer became stronger over time. Moreover, patent transfer guaranteed firms’ productivity growth, but no evidence was found that factors such as age and size could increase productivity. Finally, cultural similarity could be another factor conditioning the effectiveness of technology transfer in the productivity of adopting firms.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual model of smart tourism destination competitiveness to provide implications in terms of smart tourism destination realization and smart tourism destination competitiveness development. A literature review on tourism destination competitiveness and smart tourism destination is performed. A conceptual model is suggested on the basis of the model of destination competitiveness developed by Crouch and Ritchie (1999). The suggested conceptual model integrates the traditional concepts of comparative advantages and competitive advantages, seven core resources and attractors, and five destination management factors. Smart technology is included as a new core resource and attractor in the model. This study is the first to comprehensively conceptualize smart tourism destination competitiveness. Moreover, this study has practical value in the sense that it focused on the convergence between smart technology and other factors.

The proliferation of mobile applications and the unique characteristics of the mobile environment have attracted significant research interest in understanding customers’ purchasing behaviors in mobile commerce. In this study, we extend customer value theory by combining the predictors of product performance with customer value framework to investigate how in-store information creates value for customers and influences mobile application downloads. Using a data set collected from the Google Application Store, we find that customers value both text and non-text information when they make downloading decisions. We apply latent semantic analysis techniques to analyze customer reviews and product descriptions in the mobile application store and determine the embedded valuable information. Results show that, for mobile applications, price, number of raters, and helpful information in customer reviews and product descriptions significantly affect the number of downloads. Conversely, average rating does not work in the mobile environment. This study contributes to the literature by revealing the role of in-store information in mobile application downloads and by providing application developers with useful guidance about increasing application downloads by improving in-store information management.