Overlapping certification and technical efficiency of ICT convergence companies in South Korea

Since the late 1990s, in South Korea, two innovation certification policies—InnoBiz and Venture certifications—have fostered the innovation activities of venture companies and small- to medium-sized enterprises.The two certifications, however, share similar features in their policy goals, targets, and main content. This study aims to evaluate how technical efficiencies of firms differ based on the types of innovation certifications it achieves and examine the result when a firm simultaneously achieves overlapping certifications. We classified information and communication technology convergence firms into four different groups by certification type and evaluated their performance based on technical efficiency (TE) by applying stochastic frontier analysis and meta-frontier analysis. Our results show that the meta-frontier TE of the group with overlapping certifications is lower than that of the group with a single certification, implying that there is no remarkable performance improvement in terms of the efficiency, particularly when certifications sharing similar characteristics are implemented.