EUICF Chosen for MSIT’s I-Corps for Laboratory Business Startups
- 작성처
- Date2021.05.10
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EUICF Chosen for MSIT’s I-Corps for Laboratory Business Startups
The Ewha University-Industry Collaboration Foundation (EUICF, President Lee Hyang-sook) has been chosen as a new member of I-Corps for Laboratory Business Creation, which will run the supporting project for the exploration of market-linked business startups (hereinafter “Korean-style I-Corps”) based on public technologies with support from the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT).
The Innovation Corps, comprised of total seven universities—Ewha Womans University, Korea University, Sungkyunkwan University, KAIST, GIST, POSTECH, UNIST—will identify around 90 startup teams and collaborate with educational institutions for market identification, development of startup items through hands-on training and real-time mentoring for five years (two years + three years) with the average annual fund of KRW 1.2 billion for a maximum total of KRW 6 billion.
The Korean I-Corps is a MSIT project that has been operated since 2015, benchmarking the existing I-Corps program under the National Science Foundation (NFS) in the United States and customizing it for the Korean environment in cooperation with the NSF. It is an educational program for innovative business startups, where aspiring startup teams belonging to each I-Corps interview 100 potential customers within and outside of Korea to verify the validity of their business models, and based on the responses, the project provides support to modify and pivot each business item.
Newly chosen for the project for the first time this year, Ewha has established its own Innovation Corps for Business Startups (overseen by Lee Hyung-june, Director of the Business Incubator) and will operate programs specialized for women, such as a mentor group comprised of female start-up experts, education for technology startups, phased commercialization support, and a female technology forum for business startups to transfer the experience of starting businesses and knowhow specialized for women with a vision and objective to identify innovative female entrepreneurs and build relevant systems through the CORE system.
co-working place at University-Industry Cooperation Building
Furthermore, Ewha provides various business startup spaces and co-working spaces to aspiring business startups teams and support research outcomes in academic laboratories to be transformed for market commercialization as soon as possible, which will ultimately lead to creating quality jobs, forming new markets, and contributing to innovative growth.
President Lee Hyang-sook of the EUICF remarked that the foundation will “support Ewha Womans University, which already possesses a solid foundation for research in science and engineering across the board, to grow into the control tower for laboratory business creation through the Korean I-Corps Project and furthermore achieve optimal performance as a pioneering institution for global female business startups.” She also added that she looks forward to the participation of Korea’s many female graduate students and researchers who possess promising technologies.