▲ TEDxHanriver held on Oct. 10.

  You may have already heard about the series ‘TED Conference’. TED is an abbreviation for technology, entertainment, and design. It is a conference series run by an American nonprofit group whose motto is to spread ‘valuable ideas’. The conference hosts well-known speakers in the field of technology, entertainment, etc and the lectures are held all over the world. In some areas, the conferences are sometimes operated independently in the form of TEDx.

  The Dankook Herald (DKH) attended a TED lecture on the Han River. The presentation, called TEDxHanRiver, served the community around the Han River in Seoul and aimed at communicating and sharing ideas across the globe.

  There were 9 speakers in total. Each lecturer had their own marked individuality and achieved specific goals in their field. The DKH will introduce 3 of the more memorable speakers.

  Yu Won-sang (planner, Winners Secret Media Wicks) is one of the busiest planners producing performances or shows. His lecture was entitled ‘Never Stop’. He started his presentation with a recount of his personal story.

  He worked for Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) for almost 10 years before he decided he needs a change and moved on to producing idol singers. He quit his job and put together a five member boy band, but the results weren’t very good. After a brief period of panic, he took this band to China and tried to launch them there. Again he met with little success, and he returned to Korea. He felt like a loser and a failure as he struggled to find work again in Korea.

  While he was agonizing about his future, one of his friends asked him to help organize a compassionate organization’s charity event. At first, he wasn’t very committed to the project.

  He just thought of it as work. However a trip to Haiti, where he met many poor children and learned many things about the world we live in, helped him broaden his perspective of things. He began to feel this job was not just a work, but rather it was his duty to help those children.

  He has now worked as a professional planner for 8 year. He said, “These days, I sometimes think if I ever master this field, what should I do next? If you want to be a successful person, don’t stop dreaming and always imagine your future.”

  The second speaker was Kim Jeong-tae, who works at a consulting company. When he showed up for the conference, he was wearing a colorful poncho and it made great impression with the audience. The main topic of his presentation was ‘Value Creation.’ He said a creative person can bring a lot of value to organizations, corporations and communities. Mr. Kim recounted his first experience as a businessman.

  He was an elementary school student when he launched his business selling novelty goods that earned him 1,500 won a day. He said it is common nowadays for a company to find success focusing only on their own goals and that there are social enterprises who produce some clever innovations and provided two examples of them.

  One story he told was about a salesperson who worked for NIKE and suggested the company to create a range of shoes for Americans who differ greatly in size. Another one was a businessman working at Samsung who produced a movie projector which operates using solar heat. This creation was based on a human-centered design project that initially came from a village where residents were not to be able to watch movies due to the absence of electricity.

  These examples indicate a change from traditional to progressive working patterns in corporations. In addition to his introduction of them, he talked to the audience about the foursteps necessary to be a competent social enterpriser. The first one is to make a new project based on your own experiences and things that inconvenienced you in your surroundings. The second step is to get trust and approval from others by devoting yourself to your tasks and responsibilities. The third step was to understand yourself better and try to be efficient by cooperating with others. The final step was to bring change to an organization yourself. He concluded that creation is not an  exclusive property and we have to move things by ourselves tobring about active change.

  The final speaker was Kim Min-woo (owner, Bymom Company). Bymom is a social enterprise that tries to solve energy poverty by using an innovative method that works as a heating tent. The idea started from one question. He wondered how humans can overcome the cold, and he thought well how does nature overcome the cold? He gave an example about animals. They sleep all winter and minimize their movement to stay warm. It is the same as people who don’t like to wake up from a warm bed in the winter.

  He thought it would be brilliant idea to apply this principle in everyday life. He tried to recall a memory he had from his mom. His mother used to make his cousin an igloo out of fabric to stay warm. After few hours, it became warm enough to sleep in even without a blanket. Inspired by this idea, he patented a concept called the “variable size indoor tent’. After patenting the idea he visited 1000 places where people suffer from energy poverty in order to establish his product’s solution to solve their energy problem.

  “When I first started working with this idea, I felt it wasn’t really a business, but rather more of a sense of duty,” he said. He started the business because poor people suffered the most from energy poverty, but nowadays many Gangnam residents, who are known to be the most sensible customers, are buying them too. Moreover, it is also popular in many different countries. This patent emerged as a new energy solution. The company gave a big helping hand to Seoul’s underprivileged citizens and was rewarded with a grand prize. To conclude, he pointed out that “The most important role of the company is to please people.”

▲ Participants are talking each other.

  The DKH was able to tell you about three remarkable speakers. All of them have great passion for their work and are achieving great results themselves. To summarize all the presentations we heard, creativity and the ability to see the needs of others will help you become successful and more importantly, remembered by the people around you.