Promoting Emerging Industries Under the Creative Economy in Korea

In order to vitalize the domestic economy, the new Korean government adopted the economic concept of the ‘Creative Economy (afterwards, CE)’, which is accompanied by various interpretations. In fact, the CE can have many different approaches in accordance with aims and targets, whether they be micro or macro (industry or whole economy), high productivity, job-creation, or economic growth, etc.This paper focuses on the strategic approach to CE, which can be expected to avoid unnecessary controversy by concentrating on the policy method to achieve the already determined goal. This paper also deals with ‘Emerging Industries (afterwards, EIs)’ which carry obvious strategic importance. In particular, Korea’s economy depends on several industries that are located in leading positions in the global economy. The industries include IT (Information Technology) and semiconductor, steel, petro-chemistry, shipbuilding, and automobile. The dependency on these industries raises the necessity for the proliferation of CE into the whole Korean economy. Moreover, there exist increasing demands for setting up the development strategy of EIs.The new concept of CE is introduced at the conclusion of this paper, and suggestions for strategically-superior CE policy directions and development strategies for the EIs in Korea are included. Accordingly, the next section examines the adoption of CE and its strategic goals in Korea. Section 2 presents the definition and main category, and specially the strategic importance of the EIs. The final section suggests the innovation strategies for the EI development in the CE context where the establishment of an ecosystem is needed for industrial development