COMEUP 2020, South Korea’s most prominent global startup festival’s day two, had insightful speeches, discussions on topics that matter for the future world. Talks on open innovation by Henry Chesbrough, panel talk on the new era of remote work, the importance and dangers of Artificial Intelligence technology, Robotics, and manufacturing for the future, were the highlights of day two.
While Day one of COMEUP 2020 contained several talks and discussions focused on hot topics like the COVID-19 effect on businesses and startups, emergence of digital healthcare, environment and governance, day two was full of new knowledge, leadership management, and creating better workspaces.
Opening Talk: Quantum Computing and the Future of Technology
The event opened on day two with the keynote speech by Jung Sang Kim, the co-founder of IONQ and lecturer at Duke University. He talked about the company’s quantum computing technology and his own experience with Quantum computing under the theme “Open Innovation”.
Jung acknowledged that classical computers gave us personal computers, the internet, digital commerce, smartphones, and even robots on Mars. However, classical computers would never be able to solve some crucial problems such as factoring, big data analytics, logistics, and thus the need for a new paradigm in computing. Issues such as factoring of large numbers are so hard for classical computers that it formed the basis for modern cryptography. Jung emphasized that quantum computing would provide the future of technology and effectively solve most of these intractable problems from logistics to materials to machine learning. Full scale and fault-tolerant quantum computing’s market potential was immense, and IONQ would be the first company to exploit these massive opportunities. The next-generation computers being developed at IONQ would offer a tremendous speed up to factoring and other problems by utilizing quantum mechanics’ power. The computers use nature’s language and quantum physics to create quantum bits, which gave exponential storage capacity, allowed massive parallel computing for challenging problems, and combined 0 and 1 simultaneously, unlike today’s computers.
As per Jung, IONQ computers would revolutionize big data analytics by creating quantum domain models that capture the nature of big data that allows you to make predictions and identify patterns on the data. The computers could be used to solve numerous industrial problems such as molecular design and drug delivery in pharma, chemical processes in the energy sector, logistics and navigation in transportation, and market model optimization in finance. Professor Jung ended his speech by saying, “Today, the quantum revolution is in the information age, to reach the age of quantum age we need to train ourselves in understanding the fundamentals of science and be extremely creative”.
How to Get Positive Business Results from Open Innovation
Henry Chesbrough, known as the ‘father of Open Innovation’ gave a remarkably insightful lecture at the COMEUP 2020 event day two. He virtually met the attendees from Berkley, California, as he gave details about the theory of open innovation and how open innovation can help get positive results for businesses.
Henry Chesbrough teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley and is also Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation at Luiss University in Rome. He has written books such as Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), Open Business Models (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), Open Services Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and Open Innovation Results (Oxford, 2020). He has been recognized as one of the leading business thinkers by Thinkers50. He received an Innovation Luminary Award from the European Commission in 2014. He received the Industrial Research Institute Medal of Achievement in 2017, and has two honorary doctorates.
He described the definition of Open Innovation as “a distributed innovation process involving knowledge flows across organizational boundaries for both pecuniary and non-pecuniary.” “Open Innovation includes crowdsourcing, open-source, collaboration with universities and very importantly for audience today, it also involves collaborations between larger firms and startup firms,” Chesbrough said.
He also gave examples of how open innovation can help in times such as pandemic and drug development, digital transformations of businesses, manufacturing changes in line with pandemic needs. Chesbrough talked about how organizations can adopt open innovation methods and that startups are more adaptable to Innovation Generation. He also emphasized on infrastructure, spreading the process internally and externally of an organization and also importance of evaluation to get real results. “To get better results from Open Innovation, you need to embrace all these three facets, Innovation Generation, Innovation Absorption and Innovation Dissemination.”
Panel: Open Innovation: How Big Enterprises Collaborate with the Startup Ecosystem
Continuing with Henry Chesbrough’s “open innovation’ theme panel discussions were held on the subject. The first panel talk on open innovation was moderated by Young Hoon Park, leading partner at investment and new business development at GS Shop, a Korean retail company, part of GS Group.
The panelists included Sang Hwan Yang, who is currently supporting technology startups grow as Naver’s D2 Startup Factory leader, Cong-Thang Huynh is an entrepreneur from Vietnam who has influence startup, innovation in ASEAN especially Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and Chile and Dong Heon Shinn is currently working on ICT-based new business development and open innovation with domestic and foreign startups at LG Corporation’s solution division. The panel experts shared their vast experience in supporting startup eco-system in various countries and talking about providing new business models for startups.
Panel: Can CVC Keep Up as Startup Needs Change?
The second panel talk on ‘Open Innovation’ was held via video conferencing. Andrew Baisely, Managing Director of Tech in Asia Studios, moderated the panel virtually. O Kwon, partner at FuturePlay, James Park, a specialist in strategy and fundraising, Jupe Tan of Plug & Play that runs startup accelerator programs were the panel members.
Remote Work
Speech: The Great Reset after COVID-19
COVID-19 has changed the way we work; we have meetings and conferences. It has almost all become remote work now. Hence, it certainly is an important topic to be discussed at Korea’s biggest startup festival being organised remotely now. To talk about the way work system changes, Gary A. Bolles,Chair for the Future of Work of Singularity University was invited for a keynote presentation on the subject on day two of the event.
Gary A. Bolles is an internationally-known lecturer, writer, and consultant on the future of work, learning, and the organization. His focus is on helping individuals, organizations, communities, and countries thrive in the transition to a digital economy and develop actionable strategies to deal with what he calls “The Great Reset”.
Gary talked about how we have to take these pandemic times as an opportunity to reset the way we work. He talked about how large companies can help innovate the startups and how companies can leverage the new norm of distributed talent. “In a suddenly distributed world, we need to have new approaches to help within organization and outside to innovate continuously,” Gary said. “As we become more distributed world, there is need to leverage more distributed talent,” he added.
Panel: The New Era of Remote Work: Strategies for the Distributed Enterprise
After his keynote speech, Gary A. Bolles invited other experts on the subject and held a remote video conference.
The Panelists invited for the talk included Amanda Stanaway from Australia, who has been instrumental in creating some of the most cutting edge workplaces in Australia and globally. Amanda principal at international firm Woods Bagot and also contributes to the industry through her role as a public speaker, writer, and lecturer, and remains focused on promoting and evolving workplace design. Christian Glessner, the founder and CEO of Hololux, joined the discussion. In an emerging digital world, Christian helps his clients to become more successful by using the latest technologies like Serverless Computing, Mixed Reality, and AI. John S. Kim is the Co-founder and CEO of SendBird, the world’s no.1 chat API, was also one of the panellists. The panel discussed the changes in the work system that has happened and how leaders can better manage the workforce.
John S. Kim gave some examples of companies that are adapting to the new ways of remote work like by managing everything through a common online platform. Amanda talked about the future of office space designs, healthy & safety. “People have missed during these pandemic times is the social and human part of work. So it is also time to think about design offices in a way that ensures better space. And certainly the office culture is not going to cease to exist,” were Amanda’s thoughts. “Long term the density of workspace will identify and there will be basic hygiene changes like having smart spaces,” she added. Christian Glessner talks about how Virtual Reality can be the new technology that can be an important part of the new and safer workspaces. “VR will be a very important part of communication in the future,” Christian said.
Future of Work : Collaborating with AI
The panel talked about AI as part of the work in the future. Sung Jin Cho, the Executive Director of Korea Startup Forum, Korea’s largest startup organization with nearly 1,500 member startups, moderated the panel.
The panellists included Channy Yun, a Principal Tech Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jun Seung Lee, CEO of Shopl & Company, Bo Hwang, Vice President of Saltlux, who joined by video conferencing. They had deep discussions on emerging technologies. Bo Hwang gave an insight about deep-tech technology. Jun Seung Lee, “With advent of AI technology lot of administrative work has become automated and our employees are doing more to cater to needs of the people.” Channy Yun talked about how with the pandemic, the entire company started work from home, and that has been a great learning curve. “In this pandemic world, the call centres were affected as it is labour intensive, and that is where AI and cloud technology helped create a call centre with just couple of clicks,” Channy Yun shared. The panel concluded on the note that the new world has to learn to live and work with AI technology.
Robotics & AI
Talk: Bringing the Future of Hospitality to the Present with Robotics and AI: Hype and Reality
Robotics technology is increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives. Several Korean startups and global startups are investing their talent to develop innovative products based on robotics to cater to aspects of life and businesses; one of the leading topics on day two was dedicated to robotics. John Ha, the Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, Inc., gave a keynote speech and presentation about the future of robotics in hospitality.
John’s company Bear Robotics is creating AI robotic products to innovate the way food services are operated. John talked from his personal experience about how the restaurant industry was facing a shortage of labor. With pandemic, there was also an increase in delivery services. He talked in-depth about how things changed with the introduction of robots into the hospitality industry. He gave examples of robotic technology-driven hospitality startups like Eatsa and Spyce.
He explained how in the pandemic serving robots have become the preferred hygienic choice for customers at restaurants or cafes. John emphasized that the introduction of robots in hospitality does not mean eliminating human resource, instead it is what helps to eliminate problems for humans.
Post John’s introduction to the future of robots in hospitality, the panel discussion was held on the usage of AI in the real world. The panel was moderated by a startup founder Se Dong Nam, CEO of VoyagerX.
The panellist included Chang Su Lee, Founder, and CEO at Allganize, Jae Woo Kim, CEO/Co-Founder of 3SECONDZ. Chang Hee Hwang, founder of Rocketlogistics and OPENHUB and Jun Hyuk Park, CEO/Co-Founder of AI image processing startup, mAy-I.
The panellist discussed about their individual ventures and how AI has inspired their work. They gave different examples of how AI can be used in real-world shops, offices, malls, autonomous driving etc. The panel experts being founders of AI-driven startups, they talked about how Korean startups can adopt AI to succeed.
Panel: Augmenting Offline with Robot and AI
Robotics in the offline world was the topic for this panel moderated by Sung Jae Hwang(Dr.), a serial entrepreneur, investor and inventor and founder of a retail-tech Korean startup LOUNGE LAB. The panelists included Jin Hyo Kim, CEO of Dogugonggan, Jong Hoon Park, an active expert in the robot control area in the industry who has developed a series of industrial collaborative robots (cobots) and Andrew Lee, CEO of Neubility, a company that develops autonomous software for last-mile Robotics.
The panelists who are leaders in robotics technology discussed how startups are recognizing the importance of robotics & AI technology. They said that they were encouraged about the increase in investments in robotics technology startups. The panel discussed is AI & Robotics taking human jobs? They unanimously agreed that technology is creating more jobs as it needs human intelligence to create advanced technologies.
Manufacturing
Keynote: Digitalization, a Strategy for Industry Transformation
Manufacturing and industries are important for growing startups to understand and be part of it. With innovation in digital technology, the industries are seeing the transformation, and especially with COVID-19 restrictions, digitalization is the driving force. Byeng Dong Youn is the CEO of OnePredict and Professor of SNU Mechanical Engineering, led the talk on effects of digitalization on industries and strategies to adopt for the future.
Byeung Dong Youn talked about industrial digitalization in manufacturing with examples in the power, utility, and manufacturing sectors. “Digitalization when widely spread in our society will bring disruptive innovation,” he said. Byeung Dong Youn emphasized on the fact that not many industries have realised the importance of digitalization yet and now is the time to conquer the manufacturing world with it. He answered few questions from attendees as he cited examples of large industries like the energy sector and medium industries like semiconductors or automated industry that need digitalization,and eventually, the SMEs will also require the technology.
Byeng Dong Youn has won 9 awards at global data challenges using Industrial AI technology, industrial data, domain knowledge he and his lab has accumulated. He is leading the digitalized technology with GuardiOne, a Digital Twin product that predicts and manages the integrity of industrial facilities. Recently, Byeng Dong has commercialized power plant turbines, substation transformers/circuit breakers, wind power generators, industrial robots/motors, and more. OnePredict has attracted an investment of 20 billion won within three years of its founding. Following its success, OnePredict has been named “Future Unicorn” by the Ministry of Science and ICT.
AI-based Next Generation Infrastructure
Following Byeng Dong Youn’s talk was a panel discussion about the next-generation AI-based infrastructure possibilities. Jin Soo Kim, Director of KT Investment, moderated the panel. The panelists included Byeolteo Park, CEO of Seadronix, is pioneering a new market by entering the Smart Port industry using technology and marketing skills, Daniel Lim is the CEO of Crocus, an Energy AI Platform startup and Jay Choi, the co-founder and CEO of Nearthlab, which develops autonomous drone solutions for inspection and analysis of blade defects.
The Korean startup founders of the panel talked about AI-technology’s role in their businesses and how they want to further develop the technology-based solutions. They talked how there is need for industry specific processes, how Korea is progressing in the sector and how the development process is becoming ‘intact.’
Flow Optimization: Factories, Logistics Facilities, and People
The pandemic challenged the manufacturing sector most where remote working is not a possibility. The panel discussed about how things are changing within the manufacturing sector. Ji Yong Um is a reporter for Byline Network, a media platform, moderated the talk.
Byung Soo Kim is the CEO and a founder of Motion2AI, Dr. Yoon Haeng Lee is the CEO/Co-Founder of AIDIN ROBOTICS, Tae Young Jeong, CEO of PLAIF were the panel experts. They talked about how challenging it is to automate manufacturing sectors like logistics, warehousing, factories, and human resources. The panel then talked about how technologies are being developed to overcome the challenges for the manufacturing sector. However, the outreach of technology is still not so much in Korea yet, and how can it be utilised more. There was talk about the usage of industrial robots, AI technology in logistics & warehousing, and how can robots and human resource co-exist.
Koreatechdesk.com is covering the entire event for its global readers and will be bringing on more concise and informative features on the 3-day event of COMEUP 2020, so keep following the updates. For participating in the event live – global participants can log on to www.kcomeup.com website or follow their YouTube Channel.
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