It started to rain early in the morning on July 13, 2011. The people who fought their way through the rain to gather at the JW Marriott Hotel one by one added up to 60. They were there to participate in the IPAK Meeting. They had a light breakfast with neatly arranged Korean food. After the meal, a speech began from Mr. Chung Kyung Won, the President of the National IT Industry Promotion Agency. His lecture took off with a little joke by saying that he decided to pronounce NIPA as nay-pa instead of ni-pa, which brings up the image of a particular tool. After a brief general summary of NIPA's current state, the main speech continued.
Today's IT industry is shifting from equipment and IT machinery, the hardware sector, to software and information services, the software sector. This process can be seen as the maturity stage of the IT industry. A problem that Korea's IT industry faces now after achieving its constant growth, the decline of the growth rate was brought up. As part of the efforts made to overcome that growth rate decline, solutions for industry expansion through the convergence of the entire sectors of the IT industry are sought, along with cultivation for high-class human resources.
Creative talents are being trained from the IT's High-Class Human Resource Cultivation Program, running an extraordinary curriculum such as MIT Media Labs. Furthermore, outstanding students and second-to-none experts are coordinated for apprentice courses, and after that, first-class talents called the 'Software Maestros' are born. "A 'Software Maestro' is the title given to the final 10 students who have been chosen after making their way through the stage-by-stage survival competition. These students are even given funding for starting up businesses," says the Director Jung Kyeong Won.
Regarding green growth, energy + IT convergence business models are discovered. Buildings, factories, energy management systems, LED lighting control - these systems are grafted onto IT technology, and after testing the energy-saving effects, they will be applied to real life. Also, the wide use of e-books is being promoted with the development of electronic document standards. This is a policy for nature preservation by significantly reducing yearly paper use which reaches to 200,000 tons in Korea.
