Yonsei School of Business

 Yonsei School of Business chose “Start-ups, Entrepreneurship, and Convergence” as its new education motto to meet the demands of rapidly changing times. Space for realizing new approaches to education are reflected in the Business building completed in September. A typical example is the Starts-up Incubating Area for students wanting to start their own businesses. A Design Garage where prototypes can be developed is another notable example. Facilities including 3D printers will soon be available in the Design Garage.

 The Start-ups Incubating Area in Room 209 provides four rooms, and theStart-ups Club, “Team Planet,” was the first to enter, moving into Room 209-1. Team Planet was selected as the first student venture team to move in after it received the highest score among six teams in the Student Venture Competition co-hosted by YSB and the Yonsei Enterprise Support Foundation and because team leader Daewon Roh (entering class of 2010, Business) is a student at YSB. Other team members are Yewon Choi (entering class of 2013, Business) and Kunho Lee (entering class of 2013, Computer Science).

 The service provided by Team Planet is called “Bring it.” They plan to offer preorder services for morning coffee. Team members of Team Planet are all heavy coffee drinkers. When they had first period classes, they had no time to buy their morning coffee. Having coffee in the morning is important, but leaving home 10 minutes earlier to buy coffee was hard work. Hence, they could buy coffee only a couple of times a week, although they wanted to every day. As they continued to miss their morning coffee, they began to think of a way to preorder coffee while in the subway or on the bus and get it immediately upon arrival. They learned that workers face the same issue by conducting field surveys and interviews in Gwanghwamun for two months.

 Bring it targets the morning markets of small franchise cafes. However, team members think consumers’ mobile payment experience is the key to success, not the size of the current target market. They believe that Bring it is able to capitalize on users’ experience with online payments in offline shops in which in the future mobile payment will be common. So what are their future plans? “Our primary goal is to secure consumers’ purchase experience through mobile payment in the keyword ‘breakfast’ and ‘coffee.’ Then we’ll expand our domain to fields of on-site takeout food (sandwiches, toast, salad, etc.) related to ‘breakfast,’” said leader Daewon Roh. He then added that their ambition is to expand into China and serve every kind of takeout.

 Coming and going from the Business Building, students will observe people devoting themselves with a passion in the Start-up Incubating Area and will naturally come to accept that founding a business is not the preserve of people with great ideas but something that can be undertaken with their friends and colleagues. Team Planet is expected to be the trigger for other student venture teams to move into the Business Building and grow into great business founders like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs.