A Global Hub of Entrepreneurship Knowledge Platform of the 21st Century
In 2015, Yonsei School of Business, in designing the next 100 years, embarked on an ambitious goal in developing a global hub of Innovation and Start-up Knowledge Platform of the 21st century with funding support by AMOREPACIFIC Corporation. In this direction, the YVIP (Yonsei Venture, Innovation and Startup Program) was launched in 2017 and it aims to promote students’ entrepreneurship-related curricular and extracurricular activities, encourage faculty’s research on a start-up ecosystem, and build strong networking with start-up entrepreneurs, venture capitals, and relevant government agencies.
Consequently the YVIP aims to become the leading institute for both education and research to cultivate entrepreneurship with a special focus on the influence of innovation across all fields of business management.
Since 2015, the YSB has been continuously developing entrepreneurship and innovation related courses to instill the entrepreneurial spirit in its students. Yonsei School of Business (YSB) is the first Business School in Korea to establish and operate new concentration course in Entrepreneurship & Innovation. By providing practical education in and out of classrooms for nourishing entrepreneurship, YSB aims to cultivate innovative business leadership for students who are passionate about tackling challenges to start their new business.
The paradigm shift in business education toward technology convergence makes it even more important for the School to cultivate leaders for the new era. Moreover, the recent restructuring of major Korean industries and a slow economic environment have made entrepreneurship and technology-based startups much more essential for the Korean economy. Consequently, YSB has been continuously developing a startup ecosystem to instill an entrepreneurial spirit in its students. This effort led in 2017 to the implementation of a concentration in entrepreneurship and innovation. This concentration aims to provide education and startup experiences to produce leaders with an entrepreneurial mindset. Consisting of four categories of Opportunity and Ideation, New Product Development and Technology Venture, Entrepreneurship and Social Ventures, and Innovation Management, students are required to fulfil a minimum of 12 credits within this curriculum to earn this concentration as detailed below.
| Categories | Credits |
|---|
| Entrepreneurship & Innovation Curriculum |
Opportunity & Ideation |
12 (At least two courses from Business Administration must be included) |
| New Product Development & Technology Venture |
| Entrepreneurship & Social Venture |
| Innovation Management |
| Extracurricular Activities |
Participate in on/off campus entrepreneurship competition |
Fulfil one |
| Take at least one of the courses that involves a project to solve a problem in the community |
| 60 Credits (48 credits for major requirement + 12 additional credits) |
This program aims to cultivate students’ entrepreneurship & innovation through hands-on experience. In this 3-credit capstone course of Business Major, students actively engage in challenging problems of global and local communities to reach out business solutions through applying their fundamental knowledge in the real business world. It is designed to provide students with entrepreneurial practical problem solving with hands-on experience. Partnership parties include all kinds of organizations in the business world; they are large companies, ventures, social enterprises, non-profit organizations, and municipalities.
Such courses are as follows; uGET, uSET, Social Contribution Project uSEE, Social Venture Project uSEE, Startup Consulting Project uCAN.
This is one of the extracurricular activities of YVIP. It is the lecture series, which is the class-lectures opening to the public, where it brings together a curated group of doers - those in industry and academia who have visions and are on the forefront of their disciplines. It is an opportunity for all of our students and members of the Yonsei community to come to the lectures and share insight, challenges and passions that lie at the intersection of business education and the world of business.
YVIP supports and incubates startups, as a stepping stone for future entrepreneurs raise the business mindset, by providing both network and the space to go beyond school and to take the lead toward the world of new business. The YVIP holds the YSB Startup Competition that serves as a gateway for entrepreneurship challenge, and offers Startup Internship Programs to provide students with entrepreneurial practical work experience. These programs are designed to let students experience the world of startup and enhance their entrepreneurship. A few Startup teams take the incubation spaces laid on the second floor of Business Building and are encouraged to constantly develop their new business.
YSB offers Global Startup Internship as a three-credit course, and sends students to global startup support programs run by leading entrepreneurship centers in other universities and global accelerating institutions, where they get helped to experience the process of developing a new business idea targeting the global market from design thinking through converging different cultures and technology. This program is designed to provide students with entrepreneurial practical work experience and ultimately help them who are passionate about starting a new business in the global market. Students are dispatched every year to programs such as Aalto Ventures Program (Helsinki, Finland), XnTree-Level39 (London, UK), and KIC-Silicon Valley (San Francisco, USA).
YSB has expanded a practice connection with early startups that began in 2018 in which YSB implemented a “student-startup matching” program to give practical support to startup business as a way to give students an opportunity to observe and participate directly in the ecosystem of startups and to improve their capabilities of entrepreneurship and creativity. Going a step further, the YSB has made an arrangement with main startup accelerators in Korea. In this arrangement, YSB is managing 3-credit-based internships by sending students to relevant startup companies from the accelerators to gain further knowledge of startups. By matching students with domestic startups for internships, the startup companies get student assistance in running their business while students gain entrepreneurial experience.
In the fall semester, this competition is organized by YSB, hosted by YVIP, and led by YVIP student organization as a startup festival for students who are passionate about tackling challenges to start a new business to freely participate in. YVIP mentors provide online and offline field-based practical advice to students preparing for startups and review the startup competition to give ongoing guidance to selected teams.
The YVIP supports industry-academic cooperation in many areas. The YSB invites many practitioners every year to lectures, YVIP Colloquiums, YVIP Global CEO Talks, and YVIP Global Conference. YSB holds these programs as extracurricular activities and aims to provide global research networks with global entrepreneurship researchers and global business leaders. Scholars from around the world are invited to talk about global entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem, which lead students to have new insights and to have their global networking opportunities. To support YVIP networking, twenty two experts in areas such as Venture Capital Ecosystem, Digital Economy, the 4th Industrial Revolution are appointed as YVIP advisors and mentors to provide all the efforts from practical advice to front-end mentoring.
The YVIP Global Conference is designed to establish a global research network with global startup innovation researchers. By inviting scholars from around the world, YVIP seeks to play a role to expand global networking opportunities through sharing insights from discussions on entrepreneurship & innovation, and its ecosystem. YVIP Global Conference is held on November or December every year.
2018 YVIP Global Conference Program
2017 YVIP Global Conference Program
YSB holds the YVIP Colloquium Series, every month on a regular basis, where the entrepreneurship-related lectures are given by distinguished invited speakers in various fields of industry. It is designed to learn about global entrepreneurs’ insight on venture, innovation, startup, and the 4th Industrial Revolution, and to develop networking system with them.
The YVIP Global CEO Talk has a plan to awaken students’ aspirations to realize their entrepreneurial goals and to deliver global business leaders’ innovation and management philosophies. We invite innovative CEOs from various fields of the real business world to share their experiences in terms of innovation management.
In the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, the YVIP is prepared to lead the direction for future business research. To this end, the YVIP selected four major themes for research: Entre- & Intrapreneurship, Ventures and Startups, Creativity and Innovation, and the 4th Industrial Revolution and Technological Innovation. The YVIP aims at creating a knowledge platform that can contribute to the global startup ecosystem, and plans to reinforce the core competencies of YSB’s research through ‘Entrepreneurship Research Support Project’. One of the most important supports for entrepreneurship research is the database construction to become a global hub of knowledge platform. The YVIP supports this by subscribing to the entrepreneurship database to let students and faculty explore information about startup innovation in the global market.
