Promoting innovation in Korea

Commercializing oriental medicine

The current economic crisis has forced industrialized countries to reconsider their future economic strategies. South Korea, for example, a country with a developed manufacturing industry, is looking into promoting economic growth through innovation in new areas such as medicinal products and nanotechnologies.

The Korean government is preparing the legal framework to assist with promoting innovation through the Industrial Education Promotion and the Academy-Industry Cooperation Promotion Act, to be passed in the National Assembly next month.

Based on this new legislation, three of the top Korean universities, the Kyunghee University, the Korea University and the Dongguk University, will establish technology holding companies, with the mandate of commercializing new technologies produced within the academic research environment. The three universities will contribute 13.7 billion KRW ($11.6 million CDN) in the holding companies.

This new holding companies will initially target oriental medicine pharmaceutical companies, but also will investigate OLED applications and various nanotechnologies.

This sounds familiar…

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Tags: commercialization, economics, globalization, industry, policy