Still swiping an employee identification card to gain entry at work? Daehoon Kim has developed an identification system around the iris of an eye.

And for those struggling to point and click with a mouse, Jason Song's "eyeball sensor" allows users to move things just by looking at them.

All these ideas — and the people behind them — are housed in the Korea Business Development Center, an incubator financed largely by the Korean government that helps Korea-based companies launch and expand in the United States. Many are in the research-and-development phase, flying between laboratories in Seoul and sales operations in the United States. The one-room office allotted to each may be tiny, but these innovators cram them with big dreams.

As they make their pitch to anyone who will listen, at trade shows, networking lunches and cocktail receptions, the businesses are battling to compete with multibillion-dollar U.S.-based companies also charged with finding the Next Big Thing.

While outsourcing jobs to foreign lands stirs fierce debate around the water cooler, the reverse influx has been a quieter but significant trend. Besides their products, overseas companies opening offices in the United States bring new ideas, a handful of jobs and their tax dollars.

Officials in suburban Fairfax County, Va., where the incubator is located at Tysons Corner, say they had four Korea-based businesses in 2000. Now they have 51.

"The Korean business community has become increasingly aggressive in general," said Gerald Gordon, president of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. He cited the Asian economic crisis and a worldwide slump after Sept. 11, 2001. "South Korean businesses started to look elsewhere ... Europe and the United States. Their technologies are comparable in quality. It was an obvious market for the Korean business."

Several other factors have fueled their entry, according to experts and the newcomers themselves. With 66,000 Koreans in the Washington area, according to the 2000 Census, churches, groceries and restaurants already have been established to ease the transition. In Korea, many technology companies benefited from government contracts and hope for the same in a security-conscious United States. And the governments of Fairfax County and South Korea exercise business diplomacy; last summer, Fairfax opened an office in Seoul to lure business, while the Korean government has been sponsoring the Tysons Corner development center since late 2000.

On a recent afternoon, a half-dozen executives sat around the incubator's conference room outlining their products and business plans. Some had left behind spouses and children to build their business, while others brought their families with the intention of staying.