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.

Despite the number of sailings canceled in the past few months, as demand has increased, the utilization of ships has become very high, resulting in sudden peaks of activity at the import container terminals. Ship-to-ship operations and yard activity at the container terminals are at their peak and starting to affect land operations on truck arrivals and departures. In response, a Truck Appointment System (TAS) has been developed to mitigate truck congestion that occurs between the gate and the yard of the container terminal. The vehicle booking system is developed and operated in-house at large-scale container terminals, but efficiency is low due to frequent truck schedule changes by the transport companies (forwarders). In this paper, we propose a new form of TAS in which the transport companies and the terminal operator cooperate. Numerical experiments show that the efficiency of the cooperation model is better by comparing the case where the transport company (forwarder) and the terminal operator make their own decision and the case where they cooperate. The cooperation model shows higher efficiency as there are more competing transport companies (forwarders) and more segmented tasks a truck can reserve.

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This article paper investigates the effectiveness of innovation financing systems by examining the structural equation modeling (SEM) that imputes relationships among latent variables including innovation financing, technology innovation competency, financial performance and non-financial performance of innovative SMEs in Korea. It is identified that innovation financing increases not only technological innovation competency but also business performance of innovative SMEs in Korea. Meanwhile, innovation competency decreases financial performance of firms and increases non-financial performance. These findings are helpful to policy makers in developing countries which should allocate scarce resources efficiently for its economic growth. Providing innovation financing through technology appraisal to innovative SMEs has the potential to grow into one of the most efficient financial policies.

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