Alumni CEO Talk
Prove yourself through experience. We talked to Lee Jun Hyung CEO of N-Jobber Schumpeter
who jumped into the pre-entrepreneurship program.
Starting a business with an entrepreneurship education program
As an undergraduate majoring in math education, Lee jun hyung was confident in teaching others. After running a study center for a living, he saw an opportunity in the entrepreneurship education market, working as a youth career education consultant with his current business partner, Lim Han-kyu (Global Entrepreneurship and Venture Graduate School '14), who recognized his exceptional abilities.
"I once trained youths with content on entrepreneurship and start-ups, and they really liked it. I was interested in entrepreneurship and participated in an educational program for prospective entrepreneurs. I was disappointed when the class ended without a clear direction. I thought that if I could provide entrepreneurship education programs that would be of practical help to prospective entrepreneurs, the response from the youth entrepreneurship and start-up education program would be the same for prospective entrepreneurs, so I went to Kookmin University's Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture."
For two years, Lee jun hyung commuted from Changwon, Gyeongsangnam-do, to Jeongneung, home of Kookmin University, on weekends, and under the mentorship of Professor Woojin Lee jun hyung of the Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship and Venture, he and alumnus Han Kyu Lim founded the Entrepreneurship Education Center in 2017. In the first year of its establishment, the center developed entrepreneurship toolkits consisting of entrepreneurship cards and entrepreneurship board games for youth, but to expand its business scope, the center entered the entrepreneurship education market with the theme of "entrepreneurship" targeting prospective entrepreneurs, and changed its name to Main Content and Schumpeter, with Main Content providing entrepreneurship education and developing new educational contents, and Schumpeter providing technical entrepreneurship education for prospective entrepreneurs with entrepreneurship toolkits. Lee jun hyung is in charge of actual startup education for prospective founders in the Yeonghonam region.
"Schumpeter provides a variety of hands-on entrepreneurship education programs based on the creative destruction of Joseph Schumpeter, a representative economist of the 21st century. Schumpeter's creative destruction refers to the process of rebirth by adding innovative methods to existing things, and Professor Woojin Lee jun hyung presented Schumpeter's creative destruction to me, and I and alumnus Hankyu Lim decided to expand the branch and provide presentational education for prospective entrepreneurs to commercialize startup items and expand their thinking. "It's really hard to come up with a service that is not yet in the market, but people really need it, so I thought that if I benchmarked successful companies and incorporated what I was good at, that would be my startup item," he said.
Entrepreneurship training programs for tech startups
The result is Schumpeter's Entrepreneurship Toolkit and teaching materials. The Startup Toolkit provides step-by-step information on topics necessary for starting a business, from developing an idea to establishing a business model to planning management and innovation strategies. After selecting a company to benchmark based on corporate analysis data and applying a differentiation strategy, the toolkit creates a business model, including a name logo and naming strategy, and then expands the startup process step by step with market analysis, target segmentation, profit structure, etc. Developed in 2018, the entrepreneurship education program has been upgraded every year and is now being taught as an online program. The curriculum and materials include lessons on successful business models, team building programs, and more. To date, Schumpeter's entrepreneurship toolkit and teaching materials have been used by 8,350 aspiring entrepreneurs at 84 universities and 40 institutions nationwide.
"It was a death valley for Schumpeter when the startup education program had just come out. We invested 20 million won to create educational content, but we didn't know how to promote it. We held startup camps with Kookmin University's startup support group, met with Changwon support groups at universities and public institutions, and promoted the pre-founder education program we had developed. We just went and knocked on doors and wondered if it would work. I doubted it many times, but because of our entrepreneurship education program, which is different from other competitors, Busan University offered us a two-day, three-night entrepreneurship camp five months after we launched the program, and we provided entrepreneurship toolkits, teaching aids, and textbooks to 50-60 universities in the first year alone."
As interest in entrepreneurship grew, Schumpeter expanded his entrepreneurship education programs from the metropolitan area to rural areas, and as the number of aspiring entrepreneurs increased due to the pandemic, he switched to offering classes entirely online.
Is there a right way to start a business?
Lee jun hyung says that whenever possible, he goes through a process of proving things by actually experiencing them.
"I don't feel confident to stand in front of prospective entrepreneurs when I'm not proven myself, and I need to know exactly what I'm talking about so that I can explain it well, so I try to experience anything related to entrepreneurship as much as possible. After taking a live commerce class, I did a live commerce broadcast, sold something, made a profit, and connected what I learned in the process to the class, and those experiences help me not only create a startup education program, but also learn about the rapidly changing world. I met a budding entrepreneur who was working on a technology to keep food from getting cold during delivery, and he went through three or four training programs while delivering food himself, and he was able to complement and develop his entrepreneurial skills and get selected for a startup package."
Lee jun hyung, a self-described empiricist, plans to dive into the experience of starting a small business, also known as a livelihood business, as the owner of a food bar in order to establish a startup training program for small businesses.
"Schumpeter has a training program for technology startups, but there is no entrepreneurship training program for small businesses called livelihood startups yet. We don't know if it will succeed or fail because of the pandemic, but if it succeeds, it will be a source for small business training programs, and if it fails, I can tell my own story of failure in the lecture. I think this experience will at least be a helpful proof for me, for Schumpeter, and for prospective entrepreneurs who dream of starting a business."
After what feels like a four-year sprint to start Schumpeter, Lee jun hyung will be stepping down as CEO for a while to focus on developing the entrepreneurial skills needed in the entrepreneurship education market. This plan includes becoming a small business owner himself, as well as other plans to transform into an N-Jobber.
"I plan to grow live commerce, and I plan to establish a startup and go through the incubation process. In high school, we study math with <<Mathematics 101>>, and I want Schumpeter to become the 'math of entrepreneurship' for aspiring entrepreneurs."
We look forward to learning more about the contents of Lee jun hyung's book, and hope that his experiences and proofs will inspire many aspiring entrepreneurs to take on challenges and adventures.
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This content is translated from Korean to English using the AI translation service DeepL and may contain translation errors such as jargon/pronouns.
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