From August 20 to 22, the KAIST Center for Industrial Future Strategy (KCIFS) hosted the First Research Workshop on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The workshop addressed the new challenges and shifts brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and their impacts on economy, politics, and entrepreneurship. Specifically, the main points of discussion were policies and strategies to be implemented by industries and governments in response to the rapidly changing paradigm of innovation. The event followed the conference series conducted by the Asian Innovation and Entrepreneurship Association (AIEA) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) at the National University of Singapore Business School in the same month.

KCIFS, launched in 2018,  is an extensive research center focusing on the developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with the aim of shaping strategic policies in relation to innovation in the corporate and political sectors. The center is government-funded and  is set to receive 2.25 billion KRW over the course of four years.

Operating in partnership with scholars from world-renowned institutions, KCIFS selected an international group of 25 participants on a competitive basis, consisting of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and professors. For the duration of the workshop, participants attended lectures and networking activities, discussing leading research topics in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Scott Stern, a professor at MIT Business School and the head of NBER’s Innovation Policy Working Group, introduced emerging theoretical and empirical research on entrepreneurial strategy, focusing on the role of a proactive experimental approach to entrepreneurial choice in the success of a company. Manuel Trajtenberg, a professor at Tel Aviv University, discussed Israel’s remarkably fertile startup ecosystem and the factors contributing to it. Jeff Furman and Heijin Yoon, professors from Boston University and Northwestern University respectively, highlighted the developments in the area of knowledge accumulation and dispersion, while Stanford University professor Yongsuk Lee examined the influence of new and potentially disruptive technologies on labor markets in terms of employment, wage, and skills.

Wonjoon Kim, the director of KCIFS and a professor from the KAIST Graduate School of Innovation and Technology Management, explored how AI is changing the performance of firms and related issues in strategy and management. Professor Kim commented that KCIFS intended to make the workshop an annual event, with the goal of “[paving] the way for the development of KAIST as an important hub of policy research in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship internationally”.