South Korea: From K-Wave to High-Tech — Why Ingenuity Took Center Stage

South Korea doesn’t just move fast. It learns fast.

In a few decades, it transformed itself from one of the world’s poorest nations into a global innovation engine. This change wasn’t only structural or industrial—it was cognitive. A national mindset of disciplined learning, adaptation, and ambition has made Korea a model for how economies can evolve not just through growth, but through intentional transformation.

This is why I was deeply honored to be invited to lecture at the Korea Productivity Center (KPC), a national institution central to Korea’s postwar development. Since 1957, KPC has helped shape the country’s business landscape through training, benchmarking, and leadership development. To contribute to this legacy—even briefly—was no small moment.

My lecture introduced Korean executives and professionals to Design Thinking+, the methodology I’ve developed to go beyond classic design thinking. While traditional design thinking emphasizes user empathy, rapid prototyping, and iteration, Design Thinking+ adds a missing layer: the mental architecture of innovation.

Too often, even the most creative organizations fail to innovate at the level they aspire to. Not because they lack frameworks, but because they lack awareness of the invisible biases and cultural defaults that shape their thinking from the outset. Design Thinking+ integrates:

This is not a creativity method. It is an algorithm of ingenuity. And like any algorithm, it must be learned, practiced, and refined.

The participants at KPC were sharp, deeply committed professionals. None of them were native English speakers. And yet, the attention, interpretation, and discussion in the room was as sophisticated as any lecture I’ve given in Europe or North America. This, again, speaks to the Korean mindset: high standards, high discipline, and an extraordinary capacity to learn across boundaries.

We explored how innovation fails not in the prototyping phase, but often during framing. When teams start from faulty premises or narrow interpretations, even the best ideas are constrained by the wrong problem. We discussed how leaders can cultivate bias-aware teams, capable of surfacing contradictions and welcoming challenge early in the process.

This wasn’t a talk about “thinking outside the box.” It was a talk about seeing the box you’re already in.

I’m especially thankful to Dr. Seo and Prof. Kibok Baik for making this opportunity possible. Their commitment to evolving Korean leadership practice—with intellectual rigor and cultural openness—is something I deeply respect.

Western leaders would be wise to watch Korea not just for trends, but for principles: how to build innovation on top of discipline, how to blend speed with depth, and how to use learning not as a catchphrase, but as an operating system.