“An Innovation Journey, in One Book” ... KOMSCO Publishes “The Story of Money That Changes the World”

[Financial News] In an era when banknotes are disappearing from wallets and paying by card or phone has become routine, a book tells the hard-fought story of one public corporation’s journey of innovation as it sought answers to the urgent question: “What should a place that makes money do now?”
The Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation (KOMSCO) said on the 7th that it had published “The Story of Money That Changes the World: A Narrative of Challenges That Turned Crisis into Opportunity,” a book vividly recounting how it overcame an existential crisis brought on by the sharp decline in cash use and laid the foundations for new growth. KOMSCO President Sung Chang-hoon and Public Relations Office Director Woo Jin-gu served as lead authors, and advance sales have begun at major online bookstores nationwide.
The book took shape amid a life-or-death crisis in which sales plunged as cash use fell rapidly, leaving KOMSCO on the brink of becoming a “second Korea Coal Corporation.” It offers an unvarnished account of the practical management strategies and painstaking organizational reforms through which KOMSCO, pushed to the edge, boldly transformed its business model and ventured into new areas such as information and communications technology (ICT), culture and exports, under the banner “Minting is an Industry.”
The book is divided into five parts. Part 1, “People Must Change First,” presents examples of organizational culture and personnel reform that enable employees to take on challenges, through episodes such as “Thank You for Failing” and “How Changes to the Workspace Move an Organization.” Later chapters use relatable, everyday examples to show how trust-based technologies developed through making money—including mobile IDs, local currencies and anti-counterfeiting technology—have expanded into new digital services.
The book also brings together creative initiatives that reinterpreted currency as culture and connected currency technologies to cultural content and local economic support programs, including “10-Won Bread: Turning Misfortune into Fortune” and “Coins Turned into Art.” This new book completes a trilogy on public corporations, following “The Future of Money Technology,” selected last year as the National Assembly Library’s Book of the Year, and the bestseller “The Future of Public Corporations.”
KOMSCO President Sung Chang-hoon said, “This book is an unvarnished record of KOMSCO’s journey as it faced crises without fear and forged new paths by changing the way it thought. I wanted to show that public corporations, too, are fully capable of innovating.”
KOMSCO’s story of survival is seen as offering a clear roadmap for the shared challenges facing mints around the world in the era of digital transformation, going beyond the achievements of a single public institution. Indeed, mints in major countries such as Sweden and the United Kingdom, which are rapidly moving toward becoming cashless societies, are also diversifying their portfolios through bold restructuring and businesses such as mobile IDs, security authentication technologies and high-value commemorative coins. KOMSCO’s proactive transformation of its business model is regarded as a leading example of a traditional manufacturing public corporation successfully reinventing itself as a technology-based service company.
[email protected] Kim Won-jun Reporter