The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (Minister Oh Young-joo, hereinafter referred to as the Ministry of SMEs and Startups) announced on the 11th that it will solicit new projects for the '2025 Global Collaborative R&D' to expand global technological cooperation and promote overseas market entry of domestic SMEs and venture companies.
Global Collaborative R&D is an R&D program introduced for the first time this year. It provides up to KRW 1.5 billion in R&D funds over three years to enable domestic small and medium-sized venture companies to secure global-level technological competitiveness through joint research and development with leading overseas research institutes such as MIT (USA), Purdue University (USA), Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), and Steinweiss Foundation (Germany), and to lay the foundation for advancing into overseas markets based on this. The total number of projects to be supported in 2025 is 49.
As this is the first project to be implemented, we plan to focus on supporting 10 major super gap fields such as AI, bio, and semiconductors, considering the global R&D cooperation needs of SMEs and the need for policy support. To this end, we analyzed the strengths of leading global research institutes such as the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and Purdue University in the U.S., and through prior consultations with each institution, we derived a total of 215 R&D proposals for the target tasks.
There are four types of support: pre-planning, demand-linked, open call, and preliminary research.
The institutional cooperation track, such as pre-planning and demand-linked, selects candidate companies within twice the final support volume to ensure smooth cooperation with overseas research institutes, and supports pre-planning for approximately 6 months. In the pre-planning stage, strategic collaboration plans for research and development are established, research and development roadmaps and stage-by-stage development goals are set, and detailed research project planning is carried out. Among these, global collaborative R&D is fully supported for excellent planning projects.
In addition, we will also support open competition-type projects so that innovative companies that have participated in the major support policies of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, such as TIPS, Super Gap Startups, and Baby/Planned Unicorns, can autonomously conduct global collaborative R&D with leading global research institutes.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups plans to designate an international IP law expert organization to protect domestic companies from disputes related to intellectual property rights, ownership rights, implementation rights, etc. that may arise due to differences in laws and systems between countries during international joint research as well as during the R&D process, and to actively support participating companies in IP consulting and legal advice.
Companies wishing to participate in global collaborative R&D can apply online through the website of the Integrated Research Support System for Inter-Ministry from the 16th to the 30th. Detailed announcements and application procedures by type can also be found on the website of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups .
Park Yong-soon, Director General of Technology Innovation Policy, said, “There have been many requests for cooperation support between domestic SMEs with excellent technological capabilities and overseas organizations,” and “I hope that the global cooperative R&D project, which is being promoted for the first time this year, will provide domestic SMEs with an opportunity to secure global technological competitiveness and serve as an opportunity to help them advance into overseas markets.”
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