Ewha Campus Town Successfully Concludes “2025 Open Innovation Club”

The Ewha Womans University Campus Town Project Group announced that it has successfully concluded the “2025 Ewha Womans University Campus Town Open Innovation Club” program, which was conducted to foster the growth of resident companies and create collaboration opportunities with large and mid-sized enterprises.

The “Open Innovation Club” program is a collaborative entrepreneurship initiative that matches external startups with the current issues or projects of large corporations to discover new business opportunities. Ewha Womans University has expanded its collaborative ecosystem each year in partnership with various universities, and the “Open Innovation Club” has established itself as Ewha’s flagship entrepreneurship program, now in its sixth year.

The most distinctive feature of the “Open Innovation Club” is that it is not just a startup program; it is a practice-oriented structure where professionals from large and mid-sized companies and early-stage startups sit at the same table to examine the real potential for collaboration. Startups can gain a precise understanding of corporate needs, while companies can immediately assess the applicability of technology-based services, making it highly meaningful that both sides can identify practical “collaboration points.”

To strengthen the actual collaboration capabilities of participating companies, the project group provided a systematic curriculum over approximately two months. Recruitment began in September, and a total of 10 resident companies from Ewha Womans University and Hongik University participated, including Damjangneomeo, HyperNetwork, BeforePet, MetaCloud, Eple, SiolSolution, INMEDIC, Hannah Shin, Dodumpan, and Poodle. Starting with the “Open Innovation Basic Training” in October (led by Baek Seungseok, Deputy General Manager at Hoban Construction), the program sequentially included “Preliminary Corporate Diagnosis and Collaboration Proposal Mentoring” (Noh Jintae, CEO of Winners PT), and “Pitching Capability Enhancement Training” (Cho Minsang, CEO of Roam), thereby improving the quality of the companies’ proposals.

The main event, held at the Rise Autograph Collection in Mapo-gu, was attended by open innovation managers from leading domestic large and mid-sized companies, including KT, Lotte Ventures, Signite, SKT, Hyundai Motor Company, LF Investment, Hoban, Musinsa, and Hyundai GF Holdings. At the event, resident companies presented their innovative items and collaboration proposals, and engaged in networking sessions to discuss concrete business cooperation with corporate representatives.

The response from program participants was enthusiastic. According to an internal satisfaction survey, the program received a high score of 4.8 out of 5. Participants gave positive feedback on the opportunity to establish real connections with large companies and receive tailored mentoring. Comments included, “I was able to directly converse with industry experts who are usually difficult to reach and verify the market fit of our service,” and “It was meaningful to discuss the actual possibility of collaboration in concrete terms.”

This year, in particular, interest from large and mid-sized companies increased compared to the previous year. As a result, numerous follow-up one-on-one mentoring sessions between companies and startups took place after the event, and the feasibility of actual collaboration with some corporate projects is currently being reviewed, demonstrating tangible outcomes.

Kim Sangjun, Director of the Startup Support Group at Ewha Womans University, stated, “This program is significant in that it has created a win-win open innovation model where universities, industry, and startups grow together.” He added, “Even after the event, we will continue to provide practical open innovation support, including customized collaboration matching for interested companies, technology verification (PoC) linkage, and the discovery of joint projects with large and mid-sized enterprises.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.