"After trying to start a business myself, I realized nothing has changed compared with 20 years ago. If we don't change now, we'll be saying the same things 20 years from now."
Park Yong-geun, a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics at KAIST (Tomocube CEO), said this at a roundtable hosted by The Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) at EL Tower in Seoul on the 10th.
Park began basic research in graduate school in 2005 and founded Tomocube in 2015, growing it into a KOSDAQ-listed company. He said that although the government has expanded support for research and development (R&D) and venture startups, the difficulties he faced in the startup process were not much different from what the first generation of university lab startups experienced 20 years ago.
KAST held a forum that day under the theme "From the lab to corporations that change the world — Korea's deep-tech scale-up strategy toward a second Google."
Park Hee-jae, an emeritus professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University, said in a presentation, "Korea invests about 40 trillion won a year in national R&D, but the share of researchers heading into startups is very low," adding, "While 80% to 90% chose universities, research institutes, or private labs as preferred career paths after graduation, only 1.6% chose startups."
He went on, "For a university's fundamental technology to grow into corporations, three pillars—technology, finance, and sales/marketing—must all turn together, but in Korea's university startups, researchers with technology are often saddled with the remaining roles," adding, "Researchers should focus on innovation, and finance and marketing experts should join as partners."
As a starting point, Park Hee-jae pointed to intellectual property (IP). He said technologies with high commercialization potential need the "patent first, paper later" principle—securing patents before publication—and that universities must also be able to protect rights to core patents when conducting joint research with corporations. He also noted that if research results are disclosed first or if joint ownership or royalty-free licenses are granted to corporations, it can constrain subsequent technology transfer or startups.
Park Yong-geun said, "Methodologies like startup support programs and patent support schemes keep being added, but if universities lack clear goals for what kind of talent and research outcomes they should produce, policies will inevitably wobble," adding, "As the growth pace of tech corporations has accelerated, universities must develop world-class fundamental technologies."
He added that graduate research should be evaluated not by paper counts or total impact factor, but by whether it opened a new field and is at a world No. 1–2 level.
Park Yong-geun emphasized, "The goal of research is to create new knowledge, and the goal of development is to make products and generate revenue; they must not be managed by the same yardstick," adding, "It is difficult to drive deep-tech growth by pressuring for visible results within a political administration's or a university president's term."
In the ensuing discussion, Kim Kyung-hwan, a professor at the Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship at Sungkyunkwan University, mentioned internal university startup support systems. He said, "Of 1,365 faculty founders in 2023, only four took a leave of absence to focus on their startups; most engaged in concurrent founding while balancing research and teaching," adding, "With the current faculty startup model premised on concurrent positions, it is hard to focus on corporate growth."
Kim said that university industry-academic cooperation foundations and startup support units also need to shift away from contracts and administrative management to roles that help form actual startup teams and find customers. For student startups, he proposed extending startup leave periods to reflect reality, as it is difficult for deep-tech corporations to prove success or failure within three years.
Meanwhile, opinions diverged over a government organization for university-based startups. Han Se-kwang, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology POSTECH, proposed, "A government-level control tower is needed to support university startups and corporate growth over the long term."
By contrast, Kim said, "Rather than creating a new organization, it is a priority for the existing ministries in charge of education, science and technology, and startups, along with universities, to reflect their respective roles in real budgets and systems," adding, "It is also a problem that while universities stress the importance of startups, most related units and personnel rely on government project funds."