Productivity improvement is one of the important goals which firms’ technology developments aim at. Firms’ improved productivity from technology development means that their inputs can produce more outputs through technology development, which makes firms’ productivity improvement from technology development more and more important in the age of technology advance and convergence like today. This research empirically analyzes the influence of the external technology collaboration network diversity on the productivity improvement of the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from technology development and the moderating effect of the chief technology officer (CTO)-driven technology development on this influence. This study constructs the research model reflecting the moderating impact of the CTO-driven technology development and tests it with the ordinary least squares regression through the IBM SPSS version 23 by using the 2,000 data about South Korean SMEs. This research empirically reveals two points. One is that SMEs’ external technology collaboration network diversity has a positive influence on their productivity improvement from technology development. The other is that the positive effect of SMEs’ external technology collaboration network diversity on their productivity improvement from technology development is moderated by the CTO-driven technology development. The two points revealed in this study present two meaningful implications in not only the practical but also academic point of view. The practical implication is that it is effective for SMEs to use CTOs in increasing their productivity improvement from technology development. The academic implication is that making technology collaboration with more diverse external partners can increase SMEs’ productivity improvement from technology development.

• 허용석(영남대학교 경영대학) | Yong Sauk Hau (School of Business, Yeungnam University) Corresponding author