MOU with Seoul Center for Creative Economy & Innovation
Diverse collaboration programs
KCC (CEO Chung Mong-jin) announced that it will pursue an open innovation program together with the Seoul Center for Creative Economy & Innovation (Director Hwang Yun-kyung) to build a win-win cooperation network between large corporations and startups.
On August 18, KCC signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for supporting startups and invigorating the startup ecosystem with the Seoul Center for Creative Economy & Innovation, at the main conference room of its headquarters in Seocho-gu, Seoul. The signing ceremony was attended by Lee Woong-no, head of KCC's Management Strategy Division, and Hwang Yun-kyung, director of the Seoul Center for Creative Economy & Innovation.
Beginning with this MOU, the two organizations plan to design and carry out a range of collaboration programs, including the exchange of information on domestic startups, the discovery and commercialization of outstanding startups, and joint technology development. In particular, they intend to build a win-win cooperation structure within the domestic startup ecosystem by actively running the open innovation program.
Going forward, KCC plans to recruit startups to participate in open innovation across its core business areas of building materials and paints, as well as in fields such as eco-friendly products, future energy, and new materials. Open innovation is a scale-up program that matches technology-demanding companies (large and mid-sized corporations) in need of fresh ideas and technologies with startups in need of a springboard for business expansion, supporting business linkage and collaboration between them.
The strategy is to discover future growth engines and actively drive open innovation through collaboration with promising startups—weaving startups' technologies and ideas together with KCC's business capabilities to deliver new value to customers in the market.
A KCC official said, "In an era of change where open innovation and convergence are accelerating, it is a crucial time for companies with high growth potential to pool their wisdom together," adding, "Through open innovation cooperation, we hope to uncover good examples of collaboration and look forward to broad participation from startups that will create new value together with us."