Innovation and Networks in Industrial Clusters: Empirical Results from Three Large Cities - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 259

venture businesses or supporting institutions. The ICT industry of Daejeon
involves the information and telecommunications components, equipment, soft-
ware and contents, and services. As of 2004, some 12,000 workers are employed in
some 580 enterprises. The sales per worker of the companies surveyed are not
high, or W ¼ 350 million, 1 with the exports per worker amounting to only 30 mil-
lion, and they have a profit model that is domestic consumer-oriented.
Gwangju, in the southwest part of the country, is one of the seven major cities
of the country coming in sixth in size. It has some 1.41 million populations, taking
3 % of the whole population. The National High-tech Industrial Complex of
Gwangju is characterized as a cluster of small firms which have been relocated
recently from other parts of the nation, the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA), in
particular, and spun-off firms, R&D institutes and universities such as Advanced
Photonics Research Institute, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, pri-
vate enterprises such as LG Innotech, etc. Since the duration of the clustering is
shorter than that of Busan or Daejeon, as of 2004, some 5,000 workers are
employed in some 230 enterprises. The sales per worker of the companies sur-
veyed are not high, or W ¼ 340 million; however, the exports per worker are W ¼
160 million. This makes the city the most export-oriented of the three case study
clusters. The Busan and Gwangju regions do not have enough number of public
research institutes that can support the R&D activities of the enterprises compared
to the research institute-clustered Daejeon.

3.1.2 Methodology

The surveys on the companies were conducted between July and August of 2005.
The total number of the surveyed companies is 180 from Busan, Daejeon, and
Gwangju, and the surveys provided the base for the following analysis. For the
purpose of the innovation survey in three regional strategic industries, innovative
firms are defined as those which have introduced a technologically new product or
process during the previous 3 years. The survey covers not only the production
network but also innovation characteristics and network. However, this paper
restricts the scope of the current analysis to the innovation characteristics and
network in the three regions' strategic industries (Fig. 1 ).

3.1.3 Company Attributes

Table 1 shows the characteristics of the companies surveyed. Overall, 42 % of the
samples were established before the 1997 financial crisis, with 37 % between 1998
and 2000, and 21 % after 2001. Among the companies surveyed in Busan, those
that were established before the financial crisis took the most part while in

1

KRW for USD exchange rate in March 2013 (approx. ¼ 1,000: $0.88).