“We Showed that Korea Possesses Advanced IT to the Global University Students”

The conference, which is supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a startup workshop in which professors, investors, and businessmen from all over the world attend and present strong performing companies and an environment for starting business.

Around 300 people from 50 universities of 35 countries across the world participated in the eighth annual conference this year.

At the conference, about 10 universities’ teams, including MIT, the U.K.’s Cambridge University, Japan’s Keio University, as well as Seoul National University, made presentations.

Seoul National University received an official invitation from the conference earlier this year after it attended the workshop by chance last year and introduced the operating system of the “Seoul National University Business Plan Competition” that it has run over the last five years.

This competition, which is supported by the city of Seoul, will hold its sixth conference around September or October of this year.

The Seoul National University Student Venture (SNUSV) is a club which produced a famous businessman at a venture company and the also president of the online game company, “Gamevil”, Song Byeong-joon, and a director of the educational company, “Etoos”, Lee Bi-ho.

The president of SNUSV, Park Seok-gyeong (20. Painting Department), who attended the workshop with four other members, said, “I could feel how advanced Korea is in terms of technology and ideas,” adding that about 10 participants at the conference assailed them with questions after they finished their presentation.

The vice president of SNUSV, Kim Hyeon-tae (21.Food and Animal Biotechnology Department), stated that he most envied a system in which a continuous process of improving a small idea into a bigger one takes place and how the improved idea was linked to a business.

Jae-Young Kim jaykim@donga.com