Yerrie Kim

This transcript was generated automatically (YouTube auto-captions) and then edited for readability: names and obvious mis-hearings corrected, filler words removed, speaker labels added where the speaker is clear. Passages that could not be understood are marked [unclear]; short omitted passages are marked [...]. Timestamps are approximate. The recording is the authoritative version.

Julius Ambrosius 00:00:01

And hello and welcome to a new episode of Campus To Capital. Today Konstantin and myself are in a bit unusual setting. We're recording at Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship today and our guest is Yerrie Kim. She's the executive director at CSE. Thank you so much for actually hosting us in your office today.

Yerrie Kim 00:00:31

My pleasure and thank you for inviting me.

Host 00:00:34

Of course. And I mean before we start, the very active listeners of you know, it's basically a tradition right now for the second season that we bring our little guest present for our guests. So

00:00:50

Exactly. We

00:00:51

is what we like to call it.

Yerrie Kim 00:00:53

Thank you so much.

Host 00:00:54

Maybe you find a place in your office. I don't know. Picture of my face.

00:00:59

So yeah, maybe let's now dive into the very interesting topics we have on the agenda today. So yeah, you started out, or you hold different degrees from MIT and Harvard combining business, economics and public policy. So how did that, yeah, very ambitious I would say, academic perspective shape the way you think about entrepreneurship today and also about innovation and institutional responsibility at your job?

Yerrie Kim 00:01:29

Yeah. Thank you for that question. It takes me back to many years back. For me, you know, my choice of undergraduate was actually a little bit by chance. You know, when you were very young, late teens, early 20s, I wasn't entirely sure what I was stepping into but one of the first immediate attractions and interest that I found myself attracted to at MIT, which is a very technical school as you might know, was actually the center for entrepreneurship there and particularly there was the MIT entrepreneurship competition which, the competition in itself was actually a very active event. At the same time the organizing team was also a mix of undergrads and business school graduate students and because of the nature of MIT it attracted many different people from outside of MIT as well and it was a very vibrant environment. So I think it's fair to say that I probably spent more time working on both, you know, being an organizer of entrepreneurial activities on campus while being a student there as well as being involved in various

00:02:59

startup activities as a student, more than, you know, going to class regularly and so on. And so I think it was actually from that university experience that I sort of got that bug implanted in me. Previous to that I think the concept of entrepreneurship was very foreign to me or the word was even foreign to me but I learned by being a part of that kind of environment. And during my, once I graduated, I felt that the right choice to make for my first job was actually something that would give me as much learning opportunity as possible and something that was somewhat considered to be challenging. And so I did end up doing a business, sorry, an investment banking career as the first thing I did after university. At the same time, I think very soon into that I realized I actually don't really want to be doing finance for the long haul. But that I really would rather learn business, the arts of doing business, which then led me to Harvard as you mentioned and that's where I started my MBA. During the MBA I, you know, lots of different interests

00:04:30

and lots of different nationalities, all very sort of plugged in and tuned in to various different interests of individuals. But I found myself somewhat attracted to this idea of again sort of business building, particularly around how can we use business not just to make a commercial gain, which I've seen already in the investment banking side. But that wasn't the only thing that was impacting me. I always felt that business principles and business concepts should be used for social impact and social good. So that's what actually led me to a public policy degree at the Kennedy School. And you know, to answer your question about how does this shape me as I am today, I think actually quite a lot. From my early 20s I've sort of caught the entrepreneurial bug through MIT, I've also then sort of expanded my tool set, both theoretically, from a business school and as well sort of was able to give a larger prospect of where those skills can be applied. And so things that naturally attracted me were like public private partnerships or

00:06:00

social enterprise or even if it was something commercial, how can we think about businesses doing good, not just extracting from different resources. So definitely shaped me a lot and it's also sort of obviously led me to many different exciting career paths and funnily enough here I am back at a university running an entrepreneurship center. So definitely full circle.

Host 00:06:25

Exactly.

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Yeah. Actually I had a friend who just made it to the semi-finals of the MIT entrepreneurship competition. And so from what I heard the rigor there is very incredible. And I think right off the bat when we talk about entrepreneurship, I mean, I think the United States in general are probably the number one country on earth that comes to mind for young innovators and entrepreneurs when I think about where they can turn their ideas into reality. And I think, I mean, within that MIT and Harvard are probably also two of the most ambitious places of highest quality to bring forward successful entrepreneurs, for example with Mark Zuckerberg coming from Harvard and then bringing forward Facebook and then Meta, what it is today. And so with you having studied in those two places, what do you think, next to like greater abundance of capital and then willingness to fund young people, what do you think makes these universities and institutions in the US such undisputed champions when it comes to bringing forward global entrepreneurship?

Yerrie Kim

Yeah. So I think you mentioned, you know, one name out of thousands of alumni from Harvard. I think what you're pointing to is that it's not just, you know, that one example that sort of is giving the symbolic

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gist, the idea that US is a great place for sort of entrepreneurial activity but actually a series of many different profiles who have the opportunity, even if you're not a Mark Zuckerberg, and there are plenty of names from various different industries of course. So I think to answer this question about like what does US provide, or US universities provide perhaps, that means that we actually see so many entrepreneurial talent. Is that an okay way to interpret that?

Host 00:08:39

I think that's the right way to interpret it.

Yerrie Kim 00:08:42

Okay. You know, I think one thing is the university environment itself and another might be the culture of the United States itself. So if I start with the university culture, and I can only really share from my own experience, but it was very flexible. So I actually went to high school in the UK and when I was applying for universities, I applied both to the UK and to the US. And I didn't realize how different those two experiences could be, but already from the application process for a United Kingdom application, I had to already specify the subject and it was pretty defined what I was going to study once I get there. Whereas in the US, it was not at all about the subject or the major. It was more about you, the individual, and they wanted to see different characteristics I guess in your application. So from the very beginning in terms of how they recruit and what principles they perhaps look at, it's a much more open-ended application and not already predefined for you. That's I think one thing and that flexibility means that during your time as an undergrad that sort of flexibility continues until

00:10:12

you must decide on something and so you can actually explore many different avenues without sort of the risk of feeling like you're, you know, not on the right path or whatever but it's really just sort of seen as a true explorative opportunity and time. I also think that there's a lot of openness and what I mean by this is that naturally, you know, universities or institutions, there's a lot of collaboration in Europe as well and probably in Asia too but, you know, where I was in Boston and in Cambridge in the US there were many different collaborations between Harvard and MIT or various other institutions that I could list. So this concept of, you know, taking a course not from my university but from somewhere else, that was not foreign and you could do that if you wanted to take a course at Tufts or wanted to take a course somewhere else, those doors were actually quite open and not too complicated. So I think it's those two characteristics that make at least the universities in the US an explorative space which then, as entrepreneurial competence or characteristic, you are sort of exposed to.

00:11:42

The other thing, I guess maybe the third thing, is just access or proximity to the real world in some ways. There is of course events like the MIT entrepreneurship competition where, you know, different industry players are actively engaged in that ecosystem but also many examples of industry being much more curious and part of the experience. So for example, you know, with Harvard and their case method, that sort of database of rich information based on real cases doesn't happen unless you're very close to industry. So I think that actually is a huge advantage and the fact that students get to get exposed to that type of knowledge and content. The country, you know, I said there's two, the country itself is also perhaps just a very different kind of culture, right? It's very big, you know. At the same time I think the education system perhaps, although it depends on the European context, but just to sort of put together a very obvious contrast, you know, there's a rank-ordered system, there's a standardized test, things are a little bit more competition-oriented than

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it is perhaps in Denmark for example from the very early ages. So I think that does tend to sort of give people a bit more of a sense of, you know, what it means to be competitive I think, or what that entails. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily in itself a good thing, but I think some level of that perhaps encourages quality to be sorted.

Host 00:13:51

Definitely. [...]

00:14:00

[...]

00:14:18

but also on the other note I think the way how they convey that information is like you're reading the script to like a movie. Like it's always super interesting to

00:14:26

go through them.

For sure. No, definitely. I mean now given your background, I mean you just described what you call the full circle of your career with studying at universities and then ending up at CSE which is an entrepreneurship center here in Copenhagen. Is there, or how did, what did lead that leap to go into CSE and was there a specific problem that you felt universities were not solving properly yet?

Yerrie Kim 00:14:54

Oh, I mean I would never dare to think that somehow I can solve problems of universities. In fact, I think it was more the other way around, that I sort of saw this as an opportunity for me to further grow. I've actually never been the type to stay in like one thing too long. I think typically I've stayed on something for about six or seven years. And each time I've always done something a little bit different in nature. So I started off, after my MBA I worked at a company called EF Education First, worked in sort of helping set up the learning lab there where we actually came up with new digital products and figured out how can we actually make this into a viable business, for example in the early days of like iPhone and social media etc. That

00:15:52

doesn't necessarily translate directly to then a job at McKinsey which was also completely different in nature but in my mind made sense because it was sort of all this sort of product and business building work that I did in one setting. I wanted to sort of stretch that and test how that might look differently or what I could actually develop further if I did that in a more, you know, multi-sector environment and I was actually involved in the business building practice, both sort of helping grow that as a practice within the London office but also try to make that into something more of an alternative service that McKinsey provided other than the traditional strategy. So that itself in my mind was also somewhat entrepreneurial or sort of something about building something new. And then, but I've always sort of wanted to do something in education from a very early age. So that passion led me to sort of take on the opportunity with the LEGO Foundation where the mission of the foundation was very much about children's learning and development. It was also where I learned a lot about Danish corporate setup and culture. And so when I learned about this opportunity at CSE, which was about

00:17:22

innovation, it was about education and it was about building businesses. And perhaps doing that in a university setting that wasn't so simple, but, you know, actually a complex setting, it somehow attracted me to it. And it felt like a combination of everything that I had done previously that I could perhaps both apply and also learn more about. Makes

00:17:48

some sense.

Host 00:17:49

Yeah. And I mean one thing that I'm curious about is when we talk about your time before your MBA, as you mentioned earlier, you spent two years as an investment banking analyst. I think you were at Citibank in New York. And I mean a lot of people always say or see that being an investment banking analyst and starting your career in IB is a great launch pad for your future career in finance and that it maybe is even regarded the best launch pad to start your career in finance out there and I wanted to ask, do you see this the same way and then based off your experience that you had in the, let me call it, school of IB, how did that shape your future work experiences and how did that influence you moving forward?

Yerrie Kim 00:18:35

Yeah. So, you know, when I took on that job, I didn't think, oh, I must do like investment banking. In fact, actually, what I did do was some sort of slight hybrid of investment banking where I did what's called public finance. And so already perhaps I was already a little bit oriented towards public stuff already after my undergraduate but then it translated to a public policy degree later

00:19:05

but this was investment banking and we were doing, you know, US healthcare sector work from a mergers and acquisitions perspective but the vast majority of the public finance sector was actually about issuing municipal bonds, as in government issued bonds that were tax-exempt, to actually support very large investment projects. And so the work was actually all about structuring bond deals and also doing that in the healthcare sector in the US. And I didn't know this when I joined but like the fact that the healthcare sector was both sort of this public, you know, semi-public sector, although, you know, arguably we're talking about hospital systems actually

00:20:04

at the same time, because hospital systems do merge and whatever, you could actually also get a taste of what, you know, mergers and acquisitions was like, so I sort of got a taste of both worlds, both like financial restructuring as well as the active work of deal making and mergers and acquisitions. So, how does that shape my experience now? Well, I still probably use some of those Excel tools. I don't know if those are super relevant nowadays given so many other ways that you can probably do modeling and all of that. But just the way that you structure problems, the way that you engage with a client relationship or even the exposure to, you know, sort of senior level meetings and the pace at which things work, I think actually definitely was a good training ground for me. At the same time, as mentioned before, the actual work itself had an expiration date for me in terms of like how that matched my interests.

Host

No, fair enough. And then maybe to move back into the present, maybe you could tell our listeners that are not familiar with what exactly is this Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship that we are in right now. So what does the CSE do on a day-to-day basis and maybe also who it is for?

Yerrie Kim 00:21:28

Yeah. So CSE, the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship, is the innovation and entrepreneurship center within the Copenhagen Business School. We have existed since 2007. So I'm continuing the good work of the original starters of this work. We've been in existence for almost 20 years. So there's been an evolution of who we serve and what we do. At the core of our work is basically three things. One is we try to expose entrepreneurship and innovation capabilities to our students both at CBS and generally people that are taking any sort of higher degree in Denmark. So if you are curious about entrepreneurship, if you have a business idea, you can come here and apply for either a workstation or apply for a program and experience both peer groups that might be in the same stage as you in terms of exploring or thinking about what entrepreneurship actually is and learn by doing, either building a real business or solving some sort of real world problem. Oftentimes it's sort of an extracurricular endeavor. We also have

00:22:58

credit giving opportunities for students at CBS as well through the programming that we do. Secondly, we are expanding our work and we would like to be much more visible and offering many more opportunities and relevance for not necessarily just the early stage students or researchers who are curious about entrepreneurship but those who are already actively building businesses. So what we call the scale-up community. We already have a program for example called Founder to Leader where we take founders who are on a much larger and more serious perhaps leadership journey because their businesses are growing in a real way, to take them through a sort of a leadership course that then allows reflection and allows thinking about business building from a leadership perspective. At the same time, I think our work with the scale-up world is going to be increasingly more important because we know that for innovation and for entrepreneurship to actually matter in the long run, especially when, you know, value is aggregated for the benefit of European competitiveness for example, that growing a business or scaling a business beyond the idea

00:24:28

stage is actually where it's even harder to succeed. So we want to be, as an innovation and entrepreneurship center, both much closer to where the action is and also be relevant in terms of research and programming. The third piece is that we are sitting in, and we have a beautiful location as part of the CBS campus in Porcelænshaven, and our goal is how do we make the research about business building or innovation or all the different aspects of operations, supply chain, finance, how do we use the latest technology, what's the appliance of the latest technology, how do different sectors and the competition or go ways to market, how does that differ across different sectors? There's plenty of researchers that study this topic. There's plenty of researchers who study the history of entrepreneurship. And so it's a really great foundation for knowledge and research and we want to make the knowledge that comes out of CBS much more accessible and also sort of create that collaboration between university and industry closer as well. So we have a triple mission if you will.

Konstantin Girst 00:25:51

Yeah, I mean it's nice to hear what you just said. I think, I mean, as Steve Jobs once famously said, I mean, there's like a hundred people that have great ideas, but then there's maybe one that's going to act on their idea. [...] And I mean now you've been here for I think roughly 6 months and you mentioned that the very first months here were a lot about listening for you. So Julius and I were curious what kind of surprised you the most or was something that you did not really expect when having these conversations with students, faculty members and other people that are part of the CSE environment.

Yerrie Kim

Yeah, I mean so many impressions. But what I was perhaps most surprised by is how serious people were about innovation and entrepreneurship. And it did sort of get me back to my university days, reminded me that yeah, actually when I was in their shoes, in the student entrepreneurs' shoes for example, I thought this was the

00:27:21

most serious thing ever and to just be reminded of that intensity that exists at the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship was a really fresh reminder and not exactly I guess a surprise but a nice reminder. I also think there are really diverse researchers here at CBS who study many different aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. And I guess it's both an opportunity and a bit of a challenge at the same time that there are many different perspectives and angles of research related to it. But at the same time, I think there is an opportunity to sort of then pull those and allow for a real platform for these ideas to be even more shared. And so I think there's actually quite an exciting opportunity that CSE can play in terms of a role for being a platform for many different researchers who are studying basically different parts of innovation and entrepreneurship to be collaborating even more. So yeah, I look forward to acting on that.

Host

[...]

00:28:51

I mean education is, I would say the best European educational system is in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. And it's probably a very cool environment for you to work in. And CBS has produced some unicorns as well with now Flatpay being the most recent one. And you just talked about that you want to work on your visibility at CSE.

00:29:33

What would you say is missing right now? Is it positioning yourself or further structural integration within CBS for example?

Yerrie Kim 00:29:45

Yeah, I think it's actually a bit of both.

00:29:48

To your point, the talent density is great and also because of the cultural norms here as well as the educational system which actually truly encourages agency. So, you know, even from a very young age, unless you're interested in something, no one is forcing you to do anything from a very early childhood. So I think part of actually, you know, in contrast to sort of a competitiveness-driven quality, the agency-driven quality is also I think incredibly unique and that's partly what makes this talent density and the interested parties being quite serious about what they're engaging in, what it is here in the Nordics. When it comes to visibility, what I mean is that we still basically reach, depending on how you count, anywhere from half a percent to a little north of 5% of the campus population with all of our programming and activities. So there is a huge group of people

00:31:18

who perhaps go through their time here at CBS as a student or otherwise and don't ever really set foot here.

00:31:25

So I think that's a massive opportunity that we should engage with and a large audience that we should engage with, especially because I think entrepreneurship is not just about business building. It's about building those mindsets and that resilience and the muscle for active problem solving with diverse perspectives. So I think that's going to be necessary no matter what kind of career endeavor you have. When it comes to the outside world, outside of the CBS boundaries, I think in order for this not to be just, you know, another interesting learning experience that I had, which in itself is fantastic, but if we are actually serious about universities playing a much larger role in European competitiveness and innovation actually turning to something of social value faster and perhaps at greater scale, then there's absolutely a role for business schools to play. And we have a responsibility almost to ensure that those that are in this environment get to experience what it might be in a very safe environment and also that we can create those bridges and connections for what needs to happen after, even though we are a bridge, but I think it's an important bridge and role that we play.

Konstantin Girst

So, right on the topic

00:32:56

of engaging with the right audience, let's maybe walk through a little imaginary scenario because I mean I think Julius often comes to me and has a lot of great business ideas where he's like, "What do you think about this? Do you think this makes sense?" And so, let's say that we actually double down and walk the walk on one of Julius's ideas and actually have the objective to found a business and then bring an idea into reality. So then what are we considering when choosing between, should we go to CSE and join them or should we maybe go to the inner city and maybe knock on the doors of an accelerator such as Antler? So how do we decide between CSE and maybe one of these other programs or a VC fund and also within that maybe what is CSE deliberately trying not to be and trying to do different than these other opportunities?

Yerrie Kim 00:33:53

Yeah. So good question. It's actually something that I am constantly asking myself: what is the unique role that we should play as a university player? I think maybe it's easier to start with what we don't want to be. We do not want to be another VC fund. We don't want to be optimizing for returns per se. We have our mission which is the same mission as the rest of the university, which is that we want to transform business, sorry, transform society through business and ultimately the best way to do that is by the graduates that come out of this institution and, you know, CSE is an extended arm of that where it's another playground and it's another sandbox where you can experiment and take more risks. I also think that it is very much an ecosystem. Innovation and entrepreneurship doesn't just happen because you only have the Antlers of the world and it doesn't happen just because you have, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs. You need funders. You need environments where failures can happen without much cost. You need learning environments where different things are experimented on, different combination of things are tried.

00:35:23

And also especially when it comes to innovation that has a technical angle, which is pretty much every innovation, a lot, you know, most of the innovation that's happening at the moment, whether that's, you know, idea based [unclear] technologies or deep tech for example, you have to actually already from a very early age or early stage be exposed to many of those different multi-disciplinary areas. So I think we have a role to play to provide those diverse environments. I also think that as a university we have a mission to educate and research at the same time and so that is our unique foundation that we stand on, is that we do things that are research-based and we should then be able to turn that into societal value. And the education piece. A lot of that should happen through, you know, active learning, but also peer-to-peer learning. And perhaps also different ways in which you can reflect the sort of the human side of building a business beyond what you might be pressured with when you're actually actively looking for investor returns.

Host

I mean I really like that because you just said VC funds, I mean they are very far left on the [unclear]. They have to optimize for financial returns and you look

00:36:53

for a much more diverse set of founders. So I could imagine that this approach does also shape the type of founders you support and attract. Because we actually had the pleasure, I mean it wasn't by chance, that [unclear] had the pleasure of talking to the GP here in Copenhagen and we asked him the question, okay, what do you actually look for when you ask yourself if you should invest into a fund or not, and then he said okay, there are some traits that you look at, if you want a math [unclear] or something similar, and I thought okay, but this is actually very one-dimensional if you only look at the people that are good at STEM. I mean there are so many more people that have good ideas, that are good at something. It's so easy to build a product right now without being super technical. So how does that structural difference of you also covering that educational angle affect the type of founders you support and also the risks that you are willing to take?

Yerrie Kim 00:37:54

Yeah. So as an educational institution first and foremost, I don't think there is sort of like a filter through which we don't support this type of founder or that type of founder or we are only like looking at this particular type of industries. In fact, we want to be as led by the students and their interests and so that's not really where we want to put restrictions. But what we do want to sort of influence is I think very much rooted in also the CBS values of typically, you know, the Nordic values but then for CBS we also have our own Nordic Nine framework. So our entrepreneurial and innovation guiding principles actually also stem from that same origin. And so the sense of responsibility, the sense of responsibility for yourself and for others and the planet, all of that I think is certainly a uniquely Nordic trait that is worth growing and sharing with more of the world, as well as therefore many different types of business models that perhaps are created uniquely here in this setup perhaps compared to many other

00:39:24

other places that can be born because of those sorts of values and not just sort of dismissed because of, you know, lack of short-term returns for example. So yeah, I think that's sort of what I would say to that.

Host 00:39:44

And maybe in proximity to that, if you then have founders at CSE that maybe now have to make the next move because they are funding ready, how do you prepare them best to jump into that? I would say it's a shark tank right now with everything that's going on across, yeah, Copenhagen, but primarily also Stockholm. I think it's like a pace that we're in, this unprecedented right now.

Yerrie Kim 00:40:11

Exactly.

Host 00:40:12

So, how do you make sure that they are actually, like when they knock and say, okay, we're actually ready to get some funding, and how do you make that show? Now, I repeated myself four times.

Yerrie Kim 00:40:24

No, that's, so I think the question is, you know, what do we do here to prepare more sort of specifically? So first of all, you know, there are many different programs that we offer at different stages of potentially somebody's innovation and entrepreneurial journey. And we believe that the best learning happens when you're actually actively engaging in something real and therefore learning by doing. So the programs are designed for example to sort of work on a real company's problem or designed to look at not just like an entrepreneurial idea but potentially a larger set of problems that might exist in the world and sort of identify both the problem space and also the idea space in the very early stages. And we also tried to make it as easy for you as possible to explore what you think is actually of interest, what is of interest to you and how does that actually sort of play out in terms of a real world need at the very early stages. There's many different programs for that including for example the Open Innovation program or Explorer. As you sort of become a bit more

00:41:54

acquainted and not too scared of what it means to be entrepreneurial or innovative, we also provide, you know, space for you to come and work in on an idea and turn that into a business. We also have many different domain experts that come and provide lectures and or interaction points. We also have relationships with our in-kind sponsors who provide real practical advice at different stages, no matter what stage you are at of your idea or non idea, on accounting, legal and various other sort of foundational elements of building a business. We also have very specific training modules to build up your competence on, whether that's, you know, events planning or team building or just knowing how to conduct yourself in serious meetings or what does it mean to then, you know, think about employment or getting people. So all the different aspects of perhaps building a business, there's very targeted modules for that and

00:43:24

lastly perhaps what I will say is that we're also, of course, I think it's important that we're actually working even more closely with our ecosystem, both the funders who potentially will be the ones that are funding as well as those who may actually not necessarily become an entrepreneur themselves after some of this experience but maybe become investors themselves as part of, to what you just said. So I think it's both sides that we should also be doing more of. We don't do too much on that side but I think that could be an interesting future area to grow.

Host 00:44:06

Yeah. I think it's a good point and maybe also pertaining to this, what's going on like in the founding landscape right now. I mean like there's a massive surge in AI-driven ideas and startups, especially also in robotics and then deep tech, and actually just in late December last year we spoke to a founder in Munich in Germany who, going back to financial modeling, actually has a startup that automates company analyses and then financial valuations for M&A transactions and he very thoroughly emphasized also how important it is to have a technical co-founder when going about these things, especially when working with new technologies. [...]

Yerrie Kim

Yeah, I actually think it couldn't be further from the truth that business schools are somehow

Host 00:45:13

Well, I like to hear that.

Yerrie Kim 00:45:17

Because, you know, you referred to Steve Jobs but I think it's almost a truth. It is a truth that, you know, we are humans and therefore there is of course the engineering and mathematical side of things but in order to actually build or scale any kind of business or impact you absolutely need the social sciences and the business school is the place where social sciences is researched, where it's advanced, where we're on the frontiers of that. So, and particularly, especially because to your point, you know, building a product, designing a service, creating a model and the analytics behind that is becoming much less costly and faster to do, then what is sort of the business, the core of any business, and management of people and the different configurations that'll start to shape because of the forces of technology, all of that becomes actually a much harder challenge and a very new challenge that then needs to be seen with a critical social science eye. So that is one point. The second point is again, you know, when we talk about European competitiveness, innovation actually being commercialized or true impact being had for a sustained period from any new innovation,

00:46:48

all of these are scaling problems and scaling problems are complex, and these are complex business problems that range from everything from personal leadership all the way to, you know, supply management and pricing and all of that, business models and everything in between. So it will always be relevant in my opinion.

Host 00:47:20

That's a good point. And I think also, [...] But I think one thing where you can actually be very proud of CBS is when it comes to how well they're doing in social sciences and also what research is being done here in social sciences, which is very nice. So yeah, I fully agree. You just shortly referred to Europe's competitiveness which is a persistent theme

00:47:58

in basically all of our podcast episodes. It doesn't matter if we talk to the German vice chancellor,

00:48:05

we talk to different VCs, we talk to founders

00:48:08

and in every episode we talk about

00:48:11

at least one question

00:48:12

one question about the, yeah, about the innovation gap or the execution gap between Europe and the US. So now as you being someone that lived in the US and in Europe, got education there and now works in education in Europe, I would be interested in knowing, do you now collaborate with policy makers at CSE to help closing that gap and if so what is expected from you as an educational institution?

Yerrie Kim

Well, so as a public university we are very much tied to the policies being set and being made by the politicians here. At the same time, you know, of course, luckily we have democratic institutions that have the ability to listen to institutions and people to sort of make some decisions about what the right policies are. So it's not just, you know, based on sort of one perspective. So there is definitely policy that influences what we do as a university or as an innovation center and also opportunities for us to perhaps share

00:49:42

what we believe are important to make happen, you know, at the CBS leadership level and that's probably where there's most time spent, is with those policy makers. When it comes to, sorry, what was the second part of the question?

Host 00:50:07

What is expected of you as an educational institution to close that?

Yerrie Kim 00:50:10

What's expected of us? Right. So I think there's actually quite a lot expected of us at this point, or at least there's innovation as an agenda in the political arena for Denmark, I think, is very considered very urgent. I also think that there's a role for universities to play and therefore they are encouraging us to, and investing frankly in our institutions to really try to engage in not the same things we've done before but to really accelerate and change the way that we're both initiating or catalyzing innovation but then turning that into impact. So there's absolutely a lot of activity right now from that angle and we're certainly recipients of that attention and we hope that with our three-pillar mission we can actually make some positive influence there.

Konstantin Girst 00:51:34

I mean let's hope so. But I think, I mean, it's been like, as Julius said, like in every episode we kind of pick up on this topic and I think, I mean, like now we've been doing these podcast recordings for over a year and I think throughout that course, I think from the get-go when we started asking about European competitiveness until now, I think our view has probably gotten more optimistic as well throughout that time span and I mean thank you so much for all the topics that we've covered today. Our last section of the episode is always kind of angled towards bringing in something insightful and motivational for our listeners that they can pick up on. And as you mentioned, it's important for you to make entrepreneurship accessible to everyone beyond the people that are just already entrepreneurial. And how in your ideal world can we lower the barriers of entry for entrepreneurship through the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship for example without lowering the standards of ideas and people and what they can produce?

Yerrie Kim 00:52:42

Deep question. How can we lower the barriers to entrepreneurship without lowering the standards? Yeah. First of all I think it's making it known that we are open for everyone, not just a particular stereotype. And therefore it also means that we need to not only have our open doors but also be a platform where diverse [unclear] and diverse paths are actually told and so that there's a virtuous cycle of newcomers and those that have had great experiences as a result. So I guess that's the fundamental and foundational thing of doing it, but also talk about it. I also think that there is, as we discussed just in the earlier question, a lot of sense of urgency for innovation and I think it's also about how do we deploy that investment responsibly and recognizing that different audiences have different thresholds or entry points to entrepreneurship. So for example, we find that

00:54:12

there's actually a lot more female participants with CSE through our academic course. And so they get exposed to CSE programming because they signed up to an academic internship where the, you know, the door towards entrepreneurship is through an academic credit, whereas those that just come in through the door with an idea tends to be more male, dominated by the male population. So I think it's also our job to sort of identify different avenues in which we can engage with diverse audiences and ensure that those also exist.

Julius Ambrosius 00:55:01

I really like that angle. Maybe lastly to round up the very interesting conversation we had today. If now Konsti and I would say okay, we take one of my seemingly interesting ideas seriously, what would you advise us to start our own venture and how can people that listened until now get involved with CSE?

Yerrie Kim 00:55:28

Yeah, you're going to have to tell me what the idea is. But, you know, don't be afraid. Make sure that you are testing your ideas, not just with customers but with different experts and really seeing, getting diverse angles of any situation. And, you know, don't necessarily take the first unexpected response as any kind of sign of failure. It's actually a sign of progress. In terms of CSE, please do look us up.

Host 00:56:17

We'll put a link in the show notes. Exactly.

Yerrie Kim 00:56:19

And we are really keen to get as many different profiles interested in innovation, entrepreneurship. And so look forward to welcoming new audiences and also getting engaged with the ecosystem even more.

Host 00:56:39

Great. Awesome. Thank you. I think that's the perfect moment to finish off our conversation. So

00:56:44

Yerrie, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule and also hosting us in your office and thank you for the great conversation. It was a pleasure.

Yerrie Kim 00:56:55

Thank you so much. I had a great time and a lot of fun as well.

Host 00:56:59

Thank you.