Every Monday morning, Park Ju-gun, co-chief executive of CEO Score, chairs a brainstorming session to discuss timely content about the corporate world and its executives, before pushing out related insights.

CEO Score is a four-year-old venture firm whose main business is to mine and analyze data about the top 500 South Korean companies and chief executives.

Following this meeting on the first day of the week, the company prepares a press release based on the content and dispatches it to the local media every Wednesday.

“From the beginning of its foundation, the company put a focus on getting insight from corporate data and offers it to the media for a bigger impact,” said Park in a recent interview with The Korea Herald.

The strategy has worked well in building the reputation of CEO Score in a short frame of time, not only as a leading corporate and CEO data holder, but also a provider of management insights.

This Wednesday, the company released data on 2015 corporate investment results, with the message that dependency of corporate investments on the nation’s top three conglomerates -- Samsung, Hyundai and SK – was increasing.

“After all, company or CEO data can be valuable if you translate it into insights,” said Park, adding that it is also important to distribute the insights to the target audience in a fast and timely manner so as to maximize impact.

His work experience at the strategy planning division of LG Group in the early 2000s helped him learn how to transform corporate data into insights. During this period, he was tasked with projects related to data analysis and also did research on the best management practices of globally renowned companies such as GE.

New role as corporate watchdog

The main data product of the company is the annual CEO ranking among leaders from the nation’s top 500 companies in terms of revenue. The company evaluates the performance of CEOs who serve a company for more than a year, based not only on business performance but also on their contributions to employment and society.

SK hynix chief executive Park Sung-wook was named the best-performing Korean CEO last year.

Its CEO ranking, however, has limitations, in that it does not evaluate “real” decision-makers of family-controlled conglomerates, simply because most founding family members exercise their power out of the boardroom.

“The more we analyzed Korean company and CEO data, the more we found areas to improve to become globally competitive,” Park said. This is why the company has gradually taken on a corporate watchdog role.

“Analysis of data related to the proposed bills at annual shareholders meeting, for instance, show that Korean companies have a long way to go in terms of better governance,” he said.

To offer companies actionable insights regarding governance, CEO Score hosts an annual data-driven seminar on issues in corporate governance, along with Deloitte Consulting, a management consultancy.

As for new projects this year, Park hopes to apply the firm’s corporate watchdog role to the public sector, targeting local governments.

“We plan to announce the research results on more than 200 local governments outside of Seoul and their leaders using the same analytical tool used for the private sector by the year-end,” he said.

“I believe it is important to consider leaders of public organizations as CEOs and evaluate their management capability in an attempt to improve the competitiveness of the public sector.”

As part of a short-term project, the chief of the research firm also said the company will be launching a paid executive search service called “CEO File” this month. It will offer users advanced information on more than 20,000 Korean executives and their social network.

Business-wise, CEO Score has evolved into a data-driven business journal specializing in companies and management, Park said. The company has already run an online news site “CEO Score Daily” as an affiliate.

The company generates about 80 percent of the firm’s revenue from online advertisements on the site. The remaining portion of its revenue comes from paid data services.

“We found a niche between a research institute and news media. We run a research arm for data mining and analysis, but also produce in-depth news content and distribute it to the media outlets for bigger impact,” he said.

By Seo Jee-yeon (jyseo@heraldcorp.com)