Korean Approach to a Teleservice Concept as an Industrial Innovation

Abstract

Many companies have been trying to improve manufacturing capabilities through effectively meeting the customers’ needs. Teleservice is a new service and manufacturing concept that can fulfill this purpose. We define teleservice as a new innovative service concept for manufacturing companies, which is the result of integrating telecommunication with manufacturing and service activities. Thus, this concept is a kind of industrial innovation. It is proposed that the level of diffusion of this concept would indicate the innovativeness of manufacturing industry. In this paper, we make a cluster analysis on the

Korean status on the diffusion of teleservice concept in Korean machine tool companies. First, we discuss what the teleservice concept is and how important it is for manufacturing capabilities. Secondly, we discuss how the Korean representative machine tool companies respond to the teleservice concept for their effort to manufacturing performance. Based on two case studies on Korean strategies to teleservice, some strong and weak points for teleservice diffusion are discussed. Finally, we identify some implications for Korean enterprises. The Korean strategies to teleservice offer some clues to service innovation in the developing countries.