Special-Appointment Professor, Industry–Academia Cooperation Foundation, Ajou University.
I study why stated commitment so often fails to become realized action — in careers, in venture scale-up, and in the green and digital transition. The work is empirical and quantitative, built on national panel surveys, firm-level disclosure data, and configurational methods.
Before moving into academia I spent a decade inside Korea’s public research and technology-commercialization system: the National Information Society Agency, the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation, the National Security Research Institute, the Daejeon Institute of Science and Technology Promotion, and Korea Science and Technology Holdings. That background shapes what I look at — the distance between what policy instruments promise and what organizations actually do with them.
Research interests
- STEM workforce development, human resource development, and sustainable careers
- Scale-up dynamics, venture capital, and deep-tech commercialization
- Green and digital transition policy
Currently
Translating Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures (Soltoff, Aulet, Hynes, O’Sullivan & Wayman, Wiley) into Korean for Pakyoungsa, with support from the Asan Nanum Foundation. Publication expected October 2026.
Korean-language working materials for the framework — case notes, policy briefings, and translation commentary — are posted at blog.naver.com/deforinnovation.
Principal investigator on a two-year National Research Foundation of Korea grant in the humanities and social sciences (2026–2028).