DBIT Technopreneurship Projects With Korean University Students

As part of our Technopreneurship curriculum, our students are given various opportunities to take part in programmes that allow them to learn more about start-ups or to understand the process of starting their own technology companies.

One of the ways in which we develop the Technopreneurship spirit in our students is to bring them on field-trips to interview founders of companies.

Such trips really inspire the students as the founders are very candid in sharing the ups and downs of their start-up journeys with us.

On 27 December 2013, we organised a “Start-up Adventure Trip” with three Korean university students and their mentor Mr Budher Song, and visited five different companies with them together!

The companies we visited are Carousell, Stream Global, e27, Advocado and ZelRealm.

At Carousell, we spoke to Marcus who gave us a very engaging 45 minutes presentation cum question-and-answer session on how the company got started and the future plans of the company.

We were very very privileged also to have a sharing session by Mr Chak Kong Soon at his Stream Global office, a high-profile IT industry leader who also happens to be an active serial entrepreneur and business incubator.

Many of the students also enjoyed the humourous anecdotes shared by e27 founder Mr Mohan Belani on how to develop confidence to talk to other people during networking sessions.

The students were also very inspired by the perseverance of Xu Daxiang (Dax) who shared his amazing story of how he bounced back to launch his second product called Advocado after he encountered financial difficulties with his company’s first product called around!.

Our last stop during this day trip was ZelRealm where we spoke to the soft-spoken Mr Elvin Li who told us honestly that technopreneurship is a very very tough journey to take up, but he has persevered until today because the rewards of seeing his ‘baby’ grow keeps him going!

To ensure we remember our lessons gleaned from the tips given by these founders, our students would also record the highlights of these interviews at our DBIT blog. Here are two examples of these blog entries: one on Mr Chak Kong Soon, Managing Partner of Stream Global and another one on Mr Xu Daxiang, co-founder of Advocado.

We also often explore collaboration programmes with other organisations or institutions to infuse our students into the Technopreneurship eco-system.

For example, we are going to organise a trip to Korea in September 2014 for our students to learn more about the start-up scene in the cities of Seoul and Daejeon!

In any entrepreneurship initiatives, networking is very important. So we also bring our students to networking sessions such as Startup Grind where they can hear from various players in the start-up industry such as angel investors or the founders themselves.

SINGAPORE-KOREAN PROJECT SINGAPORE DREAM
We actively source out overseas partners who have the same objectives as us to promote the technopreneurial mindset in the younger generation and collaborate on joint projects with them.

One such group we recently worked with, is the “Singapore Dream” Korean delegates led by Miss Inbae Han and Professor Lee Chae Won and organised by Mr Nathan Millard of BeSuccess.

The “Singapore Dream” team consists of 15 students and 5 teachers from various Korean universities. They came to Singapore on a technopreneurship exchange program from 09 to 14 December 2013 with the mission to learn more about the startup scene in Singapore and to network with the people in this industry.

Five of our DBIT Year 1 students, namely Sia Chen Ren, Htet Htet Aung, Yvonne Chua Yifang, Chan Weng Wah and Alvin Lim were selected to participate in this exchange programme which lasted 3 days. During these 3 days, the DBIT students formed groups with the Korean students, went on field trips with them to interview startup founders or other startup related organisations and finally did a presentation on their research on the last day.