[Samseog Ko's Insight]Why "Coevolution"? — From Content Export to Ecosystem Building

By Samseog Ko

Distinguished Professor, Dongguk University College of Advanced Convergence |Committee Member, National AI Strategy Committee

The global phenomenon known as K-Culture — the Korean Wave — has long outgrown the label of a cultural industry success story. At its core, it represents a development model forged through Korea's turbulent journey of industrialization and democratization: one that uniquely fuses creativity, diversity, and openness in ways the world has found genuinely irresistible. K-pop, drama, film, and gaming have fundamentally reshaped Korea's global image, amplified its soft power, and introduced an entirely new force into the world's cultural landscape.

Yet as artificial intelligence and digital transformation continue to restructure industries and societies at their very foundations, K-Culture must itself evolve — moving well beyond content export toward a more inclusive and sustainable growth model.

The strategic framework that now demands our full attention is Coevolution: the convergence and mutual advancement of K-Culture, K-Brand, and K-Tech.

Rather than developing in parallel silos, these three pillars must grow through deep interconnection and active collaboration — not only with one another, but with the nations and communities around the world that have come to embrace what Korea creates. This is not a strategy built solely on Korea's advancement. It is a model designed for shared prosperity.

K-Culture Must Become a Lifestyle Public Good

To date, K-Culture strategy has been primarily driven by content performance metrics and export volume. Revenue generation remains essential given the enormous capital required for world-class production. But global audiences are no longer satisfied with passive consumption — they want to inhabit the Korean lifestyle itself, from K-food and fashion to travel and everyday lived experience.

This shift signals that K-Culture is evolving from a commercial asset serving specific industry interests into a shared cultural resource that belongs, in a meaningful sense, to global citizens at large.

To sustain this trajectory, K-Culture must transition from a closed industry model to a genuinely open platform. The structures needed to carry it forward must actively welcome creators from diverse nations and regions, expand meaningful participation from youth, minorities, and emerging economies, and truly democratize cultural access. Openness, participatory governance, and broad accessibility are not peripheral ideals — they are the core conditions for K-Culture's long-term relevance and resilience.

K-Brand Must Pioneer Ethical, Sustainable Consumption

Korean brands across food, beauty, and fashion are gaining ground rapidly in global markets. But growth at this scale carries serious responsibility. In a world that increasingly demands environmental accountability, robust labor protections, and authentic community partnership, K-Brand must anchor its commercial strength to genuine social value — competing not on product quality alone, but on the integrity of the values it represents.

K-food, in particular, holds remarkable potential as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy. The pairing of K-content and cuisine has already demonstrated its power across economic, cultural, and diplomatic dimensions alike. Food carries a rare ability to bridge political and religious divides and forge authentic human connection.

As Korea deepens its engagement with multi-cultural societies across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, a strategy that respects food culture diversity while advancing meaningful culinary exchange will serve as an indispensable foundation for lasting international partnership.

K-Tech Must Enable Cultural Democracy

Generative AI and data technologies are fundamentally reshaping how culture is produced, distributed, and consumed. If these shifts concentrate their benefits exclusively among powerful corporations or wealthy nations, global cultural inequality will deepen in ways that may be very difficult to reverse. Korea must harness AI and digital tools to build a cultural ecosystem in which anyone — regardless of background or geography — can create and participate.

Expanding access through public platforms, open technologies, and sustained policy support for independent creators, regional artists, and underserved communities is not optional. It is a strategic imperative.

In this light, the current administration's "Global AI Basic Society Initiative" — the APEC AI Initiative — carries stakes that extend well beyond domestic policy. It must succeed.

Coevolution as a New Model for International Order

The world today is defined by intensifying friction over technology, culture, and supply chains — an environment in which fragmentation and zero-sum competition are rapidly crowding out shared values and the spirit of compromise. In precisely this environment, Korea — a recognized leader in both content creation and AI development — is uniquely positioned to offer the international community something meaningfully different: a working model of cooperation and coevolution, in place of rivalry and division.

Co-producing content with emerging regions across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa; building shared platforms; cultivating joint fan communities; and pioneering new experiments at the intersection of content and artificial intelligence — these efforts can reposition K-Culture not as a one-directional cultural export, but as a genuine model of mutual growth.

This is the path by which Korea moves beyond the longstanding critique of cultural imperialism and toward a truly alternative cultural order — one built on reciprocity rather than dominance. And as the global success of Netflix's K-Pop Demon Hunters has demonstrated, coevolution with established content powerhouses like the United States and Japan is not only possible — it is already underway.

Grounding Coevolution in Cities and Regions

The coevolution strategy must also be firmly anchored to the future of cities and regions. Metropolises like Seoul should evolve into Global Entertainment tech Hubs — dynamic innovation spaces where culture, technology, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement converge and reinforce one another. Regional cities — Gyeonggi, Incheon, Gwangju, and beyond — must be fully integrated into this vision, ensuring that balanced national development and global ambition advance hand in hand rather than in tension.

Critically, the framework for global cultural cooperation must expand from the national to the regional level. The true measure of success should not be how many Korean companies expand abroad, but how many foreign companies and creative enterprises actively choose to come to Korea — into its regions, its communities, its ecosystems — and build something meaningful together.

The future of K-Culture will ultimately be determined not by the performance of any single title, but by how many people across the world are genuinely able to participate in — and share the rewards of — what Korea creates. When K-Culture expands empathy and solidarity, when K-Brand champions ethical consumption, and when K-Tech delivers real digital inclusion, Korea will have something of profound value to offer the world: a development model that treats growth and social welfare not as competing priorities, but as a unified and mutually reinforcing vision.

K-Culture stands at a genuine inflection point — the threshold of "Next Hallyu." The path forward leads from content export to ecosystem creation, and from competition to coevolution. That is the future-oriented strategy through which Korea grows not in isolation, but together with the world.

Samseog Ko is Distinguished Professor at Dongguk University's College of Advanced Convergence, a Committee Member of the National AI Strategy Committee, and Senior Advisor to K-EnterTech Hub — a Korea-based platform bridging K-content industries with global technology companies, investors, and international partners. (koss21@naver.com)