Undergraduates from around the world come to Korea every three months, see an industry from the inside, and write reports in English. A year's worth is presented on 9 September.
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Host · International Brain Sports Association · Partner · Undenominated Church of Christianity (Plato School)
First edition 9–13 September 2027 · Seoul (planned)
Most international forums talk for a day or two and disperse. At the 999 Forum the work runs all year, and 9 September is the day it is settled. Students from leading universities arrive each quarter, go inside Korean industry, produce English reports with the companies themselves, and present the results to industry and capital.
10wks
one cohort
4
cohorts a year
9
industry tracks
20
per site visit
9/9
never moves
The cycle
How this actually turns
Six stages, once a year. And every turn of it leaves reports behind.
1
Jan · Apr · Jul · Oct
Invite
Students are selected from leading universities worldwide and invited to Korea. One cohort every three months, four a year. Some pay their own way; others come on a named scholarship funded by a company.
2
Ten weeks
Inside an industry
A cohort goes into one industry — production lines, laboratories, studios, data centres — and meets the people who work there. This is not a classroom with a weekend excursion.
3
Each cohort
A report, in English
Each industry answers the same annual question from where it stands. Students write it with the companies, in English. Almost no channel exists today for Korean industry to be recorded as English primary material.
4
Every year
It accumulates
The reports outlive the event. Five years in, five years of them have stacked up, and that archive becomes the institution's asset. A forum that picks a new theme each year accumulates nothing.
5
9 September
Presented — talent and capital in one room
A year of questions and reports is presented. Industry, government and academia attend, and investors are invited alongside them. Nobody is booking speakers to fill a programme: people gather because there is something to present.
6
The same day
The next question
The following year's question is set from this year's findings. 9 September is both the closing and the opening.
↺ back to the first stage
The question is tested on a factory floor, not at a desk. The usual pattern is: set an agenda, commission expert papers, discuss them at a conference, and watch it evaporate. Here it is: set a question, have students test it in the field for a year, produce a report per industry, synthesise on 9 September, and set the next question. This is a structural answer to the criticism annual forums everywhere have faced for decades — that nothing carries over.
Industry tracks
Twelve industries. How many run depends on how many of you there are
The annual question changes, so the tracks rotate with it. Year one opens the three with the fastest route to site access.
Open a track for the detail — what you study, the kind of site you visit, and what you produce. Solid outline — opening in year one · dashed — later. Which tracks open first is decided by which companies commit first.
K-Pop and K-Drama are separate tracks. They draw the most demand from students abroad and site approval moves faster than in manufacturing. Production companies, studios and live-show operations become the hosts — and how the Korean wave is actually made is a subject with almost no English primary literature.
Why do this
Korean industry is known only by its products
The world knows Korean semiconductors, batteries and content as output. How they are made, by whom, and in what way — almost nobody outside has seen it from the inside.
Building that channel is what this programme is for. And a channel is made of people: twenty years from now there are alumni in universities, companies and governments across the world who spent ten weeks inside Korean industry. That is what this actually produces, and the Forum is where they come back to each year.
Korean industry is known only by its products. Almost nobody outside has seen how it is made.
Inside, for ten weeks — not the visitor centre
So why has nobody been doing it
Because it is hard and expensive. A semester-long industry immersion needs international recruitment, visas, housing, site agreements with companies, safety and insurance, and ten weeks of continuous operation. It is a different kind of work from a short course or a conference.
That barrier is the reason for the programme. Because it is hard enough that nobody does it, doing it cannot be copied.
Scale changes what this is. With 400–1,200 students researching in Korea and presenting on 9 September, it stops being a side event and becomes the largest student industry-research assembly in Asia. At 400 students a year that is roughly a hundred reports; at 1,200, about three hundred — every year.
Why 9 September
In the old lunar calendar the ninth day of the ninth month is the Double Ninth, when two yang numbers meet — the day you climb somewhere high and look a long way out. The date borrows that.
And a fixed date means everyone can hold the same week every year. That is how an annual event takes root. The 999 Forum does not move 9 September.
What we are asking for
This structure does not exist without partners
No host sites, no programme. No university relationships, no students. So here is the ask, stated first.
Companies — the first thing we need
Open your industry
The number that arrives is always twenty, for half a day. Even with 300 in a cohort, groups come on separate days — and visits are applied for, so the twenty who come are the ones who wanted to.
Host a visit — twenty students, half a day, around five times over the summer. DetailsKO
Track partner — design an industry track with us and help set the question the report answers
Named scholarship — fund a place, one student at a time. Sponsors fund places and do not select recipients
Recruiting — first sight of international talent you have spent ten weeks with
Universities & research institutes
Send us students
Ten weeks is exactly a US quarter, and reads as one term away at semester schools. Everything runs in English; no Korean is required.
Nominations and recruitment channels
Credit arrangements — none are in place yet. The first cohort is the moment one can be designed in
Joint sessions and faculty participation
Investors · LPs · GPs
Come on 9 September
A year of nine industries seen from the inside, presented in one room. And the next generation of talent is in that room too.
Attend and take part in sessions
Join the organising or advisory committee
Bring portfolio companies into a track
Foundations & institutions
Endow a scholarship
One place covers a student's full ten weeks — airfare, housing, meals, site visits and insurance. Programme income and how it was spent are published annually.
Host cities
Founded in Seoul; it rotates once it stands on its own
The settled form is one Asian city, every 9 September. But it does not rotate from the first edition.
2027 · 1stSeoulFounding. Doing it properly matters more than doing it big
2028 · 2ndSeoulBuild the reason to return, and the operating standard
2029 · 3rdSeoulReach the scale that can carry a rotation
2030 · 4th →Rotating in AsiaHost city selected from cities that bid for it
A forum takes root by repeating on the same day, not by the size of its first edition. Davos began in 1971 with about four hundred people and took fifty years to become what it is. The 999 Forum follows that order — fix the date, build a record in the founding city, then widen.
The student programme does not rotate. It works because the industrial assets are in Korea. In years when the Forum meets elsewhere, the programme still runs in Korea and that cohort travels to the host city to present.
Who runs this
Editions one to three are held in Seoul, so the Korean entity hosts and the US entity participates as partner.
Host · International Brain Sports Association — a Korean non-profit corporation, authorisation no. 2022-53 granted by the Mayor of Seoul in March 2022 under Article 32 of the Korean Civil Act. It organises chess, janggi, speedcubing and screen-golf competitions and maintains a player registration system.
Partner · Undenominated Church of Christianity — a California non-profit corporation established September 2023, which operates Plato School (platoschool.us). It handles international recruitment and relationships with US universities.
The Forum's and the programme's content is secular — education and industry. The US partner is a religious non-profit that operates a school. Religious organisations running secular educational institutions is not an unusual arrangement but the oldest one: Yonsei and Ewha in Korea were founded by missionaries, as were Georgetown, Notre Dame and Boston College.
Get in touch
We are preparing the first edition
The first edition opens in Seoul on 9 September 2027. Write to us if any of the following applies.
Companies & institutions — sponsorship, opening a site, programme partnership
Universities & research institutes — recruitment, credit arrangements, joint sessions
Investors — organising and advisory committees, portfolio company sessions
Cities & governments — bidding to host from 2030
Students — to be told when applications open. The first cohort begins 28 June 2027, and its graduation is the first assembly on 9 September
Mail is received by Plato School (Undenominated Church of Christianity), a California non-profit corporation and the Forum's US partner. A dedicated 999 Forum address will be published here once it is set up.