Government IT strategy and technology transfer in Korea

In 2004, the Korean government announced an ambitious IT strategy to establish Korea as one of the leaders in the world IT market. To implement this strategy, technology transfer from research laboratory to market should be successfully performed. This study is to identify factors influencing technology transfer and to examine the contribution of these factors on success of technology transfer in Korea. Survey results show that technology project leaders evaluated ‘incentives for transfer’ as the most influential factor, followed by ‘sense of common purpose’, ‘person-to-person contacts’, ‘concreteness of technology’, ‘understanding of nature of business’ and ‘awareness of transfer’. Out of 120 technology transfer projects, respondents rated 44 projects as a success and 40 as a failure. Thus, the success rate of technology transfer in the IT industry is reported as 36.67%. Regression analysis identifies that ‘person-to-person contacts’, ‘concreteness of technology’, ‘variety of communication channels’, ‘programmes’ and ‘collaborative research’ are statistically significant in explaining the success of technology transfer.