The Wikinomics of Saemaul Undong

Abstract

Saemaul Undong is an integrated rural development program (IRDP) that was particularly active in the 1970s in South Korea. On the one hand, the IRDP literature generally refers to Saemaul Undong as a collection of know-hows and actions accumulated through the process of trial-and-error, i.e., an IRDP that lacks a coherent theoretical framework. On the other hand, while the social innovation literature considers some initiatives as being emblematic, great success stories in rural development are rare, particularly those initiated and led by the state. In this paper, I aim to interpret Saemaul Undong in a social innovation theoretical framework, with particular attention to its scaling methods through hybridization between top-down and bottom-up strategies and through the usage of key performance indicators (KPIs). In effect, I reinterpret Saemaul Undong as an ‘open-source rural development framework,’ drawing parallels with the open-source development framework, another successful contemporary social innovation paradigm in the information and communications technology (ICT) context.