i-Manufacturing: Korean-style Manufacturing Innovation Strategy Promoting Balanced Regional Growth Based on Collaboration

Dynamically changing customer demands request manufacturers to make quality products with cheaper prices and shorter delivery. To survive in the global market, the manufacturing industry of today needs to be equipped with advanced technologies including IT as well as substantial infrastructure. Under this situation, we found that "collaboration" is the right answer for manufacturers to survive by strengthening relations between companies instead of competing against each other. For facilitating collaboration among Korean SMEs, we performed a pilot project from 2004, referred to as an e-Manufacturing project. Through this project, we applied IT into the conventional manufacturing industry by developing business models and collaboration systems. As a consequence of the project, more than 300 companies are currently using 7 different web-based collaboration systems and they are reducing delivery time and increasing sales/profit. Especially, the i-Manufacturing project newly started from 2007, which is a continued and enlarged project of the e-Manufacturing, covers wider innovation boundaries including manufacturing processes, systems, and corresponding infrastructures as well as collaboration systems. In this paper, we first introduce achievement from the e-Manufacturing project and then the strategies/plans of the i-Manufacturing project, which follows the balanced regional growth strategy of the Korean government.