Asan Nanum foundation held a 5th anniversary press conference in Seoul’s Yeouido Hotel on the 7th. During the press conference, Asan Nanum Chairman Lee Gyeongsuk, the Secretary General Jeong Nami, international leadership group leader Park Jaehun, and business group leader Lee Hyeokhui explained the results of the past five years and their future plans.
In order to promote the spread of entrepreneurial culture and foster entrepreneurship, Asan Nanum operates 11 support projects to train entrepreneurs and innovators, including Hero School, Asan Frontier Youth, Asan Seo-Won, Academy, Asan Entrepreneur 10 Review, Maru 180, the Chung Ju-yung Entrepreneurship Competition, and more.
The Asan Nanum supported projects are run under the concept of “Build a world where just believing means succeeding”, and they continue to expand learning and exchange platforms from entrepreneurship education programs for teenagers and adults to academic programs for training social innovators, cooperation projects for supporting nonprofit institutions, and youth entrepreneurship support projects for finding entrepreneurs and providing infrastructure.
Asan Nanum’s key projects are entrepreneur and entrepreneurial environment support projects Maru 180 and the Chung Ju-yung Entrepreneurship Competition, which contribute to the domestic entrepreneurial environment. Last year’s efforts were recognized by the Future Creative Science Department and awarded the Presidential Award at the Creative Economy Awards.
Maru 180 opened at Yeoksam-dong in 2014 and is a startup support center mainly for communication that has been visited by 420,000 people so far. Maru 180 Startup Support Center is a comprehensive enterprise base that also introduces VC and entrepreneurship accelerators to offer education and investment in the same place.
The practical entrepreneurial support project Chung Ju-yung Entrepreneurship Competition has supported a total of 2,381 entrepreneurial teams with 45 winning teams, including My Real Trip, Novato, and Momo.
The fifth Chung Ju-yung Entrepreneurship Competition Winners
Asan Nanum plans to expand its business support range in the future by breaking barriers of multiple industries to create an open space, strengthen partnerships, and do away with concerns about profit and non-profit to accelerate the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Nami Jeong, the secretary general said: “We plan to invest 50 billion won to train 1,000 social innovators and entrepreneurs by 2021. All major countries around the world treat entrepreneurship as a main source of national development. Asan Nanum will focus on training entrepreneurs who can solve society’s many problems and can start a business in the spirit of challenge.”
