How did South Korea, a country that endured colonial rule and war, climb past the middle-income trap to become an advanced industrial nation? Its track record of quickly and efficiently applying concepts and designs developed in advanced economies to build world-class competitiveness in semiconductors, automobiles, shipbuilding, batteries and defense has drawn attention abroad. But to become a leading nation, the country must move beyond the success formula of fast catch-up and find a growth path that creates innovative technologies and original concepts. At this turning point, the most urgent task is to keep politics and administration from becoming obstacles to innovation.
Lee Jung-dong, a professor at Seoul National University's Technology Management, Economics, and Policy Program (TEMEP), said in an interview at his campus office on the 19th that "our country is stuck in a Middle Innovation Trap, lacking the capacity to create technologies and markets that do not yet exist." He added, "A big factor is that the clock of politics and the clock of innovation run on very different time." Lee went on to say, "It is regrettable that the clock of politics is absorbing everything," and noted that "even the clock of innovation tends to move in step with fashion trends." Lee, who earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in resources engineering at Seoul National University, published "The Time of Accumulation" with fellow engineering professors at the university in 2015, and has since stressed the accumulation of trial and error and experience as the basis for industrial leaps in books including "The Road of Accumulation" and "How Technology Changes the World."
Citing the Middle Innovation Trap, Lee said Korea, which started as one of the world's poorest countries and caught up with advanced economies, now stands before the final gateway to becoming a leading nation. He said concerns are mounting that the country could fall behind China in science, technology and advanced industries because it is not making enough effort to dive into technologies that could define future paradigms despite the risk of failure. "We produce electric vehicles well, but our efforts to take on innovative battery technologies or new autonomous driving functions are weak," he said. "Isn't the argument about 'Peak Korea' coming out precisely because we lack the willingness to dive into technologies that will become new paradigms, knowing we may fail?"
Lee recently published "Creative Accumulation: Lessons from Korea's Path out of the Middle Innovation Trap" through Oxford University Press in Britain. Going beyond K-culture and K-food, the book offers a logical explanation of the miracle of Korean industry and the economy, analyzing the factors behind its success while also laying out the dilemmas it faces and the challenges ahead.
Even in the age of artificial intelligence, Lee argues, the country must keep asking first questions that identify new problems and set out challenges, in the manner of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). That is why he has run the "SNU Grand Quest" project at Seoul National University since 2022. The questions it poses include whether AI can forget as effectively as humans do, whether AI can repair damage on its own, whether the clock of life can be controlled and whether the will to live can be explained at the molecular level. "We present hypotheses like these, receive challenging proposals and are now evaluating them, and researchers from many fields beyond science and engineering are taking part," he said.
Lee said the country must "go beyond the ability to follow someone else's map quickly to a destination and instead build new roads," advising that it should not fear accumulating experience through trial and error on the basis of "small bets" and networking among industry, academia and research institutes. "If it is a challenge with no answer in sight, we need to speed up learning by doing at a level we can absorb even if we fail," he said. "In the AI era, repeating the design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle can accelerate the pace of scaling up." He added, "Just as the starlight we see is aged light that has traveled a long time, creative results come not only from creativity but also from long stretches of trial and error and experience."
The problem, he said, is that the environment needed to support long-term accumulation and build new industries has not been properly put in place. With political leadership wavering, the tasks of promoting science and technology and energizing a bold venture ecosystem are not being pursued consistently. "We can shift to being a first mover only if we fix the gap between the clock of politics and the clock of innovation," he said, calling for a redefinition of the roles of government, companies, universities and research institutes. Above all, he stressed, the government must support bold research and development, tear down regulations and step in as an early buyer of innovative products and services. Universities and research institutes should accumulate trial and error in areas companies have yet to take on, he said, and companies should likewise commit resources to exploring future technology concepts.
Lee stressed that the Middle Innovation Trap is not Korea's problem alone. Fast-growing countries such as Vietnam must prepare for the innovation challenges that come after the middle-income trap even as they work their way out of it, he said. Advanced economies are no exception. Countries that once did concept design, including Italy, Spain, Britain, France and Germany, are seeing their manufacturing shaken and have also fallen into the middle innovation trap, and they have something to learn from Korea's struggles, he said. "We have to build a new road for the world to follow," he said. "Our experience will carry significant implications not only for developing countries but also for advanced economies."