SEOUL — The South Korean government is significantly expanding its public-private cooperative open innovation initiative to foster strategic collaborations between tech startups and well-established conglomerates, medium-sized enterprises, and public institutions.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) announced on May 19 that it will accept applications for the "2026 Public-Private Cooperative Open Innovation" program from May 20 through June 9, 2026. Designed to bridge the gap between large-scale market players seeking open innovation and agile startups with cutting-edge solutions, the program will provide selected startups with up to 140 million KRW to fund Proof of Concept (PoC) projects, prototype manufacturing, and service verification.

This sudden expansion comes on the heels of a supplementary budget passed in April. While the initial round of the program supported 60 startups, the ministry has effectively doubled the scale for this upcoming round, pledging to support a total of 120 startups. The MSS expects this boost to substantially accelerate the commercialization of startup technologies and facilitate smoother entries into the mainstream market through high-profile collaborative validated cases.

The initiative operates via two distinct frameworks: the "Strategic Task-Solving Type" and the "Private Selection-Recommendation Type."

Under the Strategic Task-Solving model, large corporations and public agencies outline specific tech challenges they need resolved, and the ministry publicly recruits startups capable of delivering solutions. For this round, the government plans to select approximately 70 collaborative tasks.

Conversely, the Private Selection-Recommendation model leverages the expertise of the private sector. It identifies outstanding open innovation programs already run by enterprises or accelerators and provides government funding to the startups recommended through those programs. The ministry aims to select around 50 collaborative programs under this category, relying on private-sector insight to vet the most promising ventures.

"For startups to scale effectively, they need more than just raw technology; they require practical validation opportunities in the real market and reputable collaboration portfolios," said Cho Kyung-won, Director General for Startup Policy at the MSS. "By scaling up this program, we are committed to ensuring that more startups can successfully anchor themselves in the market by collaborating closely with major corporations and public institutions."

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