On October 7, the KAIST Graduate School of Future Strategy held the “Korean National Future Strategy” hearing at the Korea Press Center, in Seoul. Currently, the KAIST Graduate School of Future Strategy is working on a project aiming to establish national strategies that look 30 years into the future, a project initiated when former chairman of KAIST, MoonSoul Chung, donated 21.5 billion Korean Won requesting that the money be used for research on future strategies and the development of human capital; the details of the project were revealed at the hearing, a platform to discuss possible means of sustaining national prosperity until 2045, which marks the 100 year anniversary of Korean independence.

The project involves 100 or so researchers, including five KAIST professors and two experts in future studies who gave their presentations and led the discussions at the hearing. The Dean of the KAIST Graduate School of Future Strategy, Kwang Hyung Lee, listed science-and-technology-based politics, startups, public well-being, and Asian peace as the four grand strategies for his presentation on “future outlook and vision.” Jaewon Kwak, the current chairman of KAIST, emphasized how science and technology should permeate all fields and disciplines to drive and influence policies on the national scale and that since the government played a big part in the development of science and technology in the past, it is now time to give back using science and technology; science and technology-related policies will be the ones affecting national policies instead of exclusively the other way round.

Also, Professor Jaeseung Jeong from the KAIST Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Professor SoYoung Kim from the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, and Professor Wonjoon Kim from the Department of Business and Technology Management offered their respective insights on culture-based strategies, political systems, and economic plans.

Based on the content shared throughout the hearing coupled with the opinions of the participants, KAIST is planning to set forth a future-strategy report on how Korea should become a creative economy as the Asian center of peace.