The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (Minister Oh Young-joo, hereinafter referred to as the Ministry of SMEs and Startups) announced that it will recruit startups (approximately 50 companies) to participate in the problem-solving (Top-Down) and autonomous proposal (Bottom-Up) programs of the 2025 'Public-Private Cooperation Open Innovation (OI) Support Project' starting on the 12th.
The 'Public-Private Cooperation Open Innovation Support Project' is a project of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups to induce open partnerships for mutually beneficial cooperation between large, medium-sized, and public institutions and startups, and to establish and support a collaborative system. It consists of ▲problem-solving type (Top-Down), ▲autonomous proposal type (Bottom-Up), and ▲demand-based type (On-Demand) programs.
Through this project, Siri Energy Co., Ltd., a start-up company that collaborated with Hyundai Corporation in 2024, developed a next-generation secondary battery silicon material recycling technology using solar glass provided by Hyundai Corporation and successfully applied for patents both domestically and internationally.
In addition, Duwat Co., Ltd., in collaboration with Hoban Group, successfully developed a hotel-style kiosk with check-in/out and payment functions by linking it with existing solutions, and the public-private cooperative open innovation support project is greatly contributing to creating a win-win collaboration ecosystem where companies and startups can grow together.
'The startups selected in 2025 will be supported with commercialization funds (up to KRW 120 million) that can be used in the process of concretizing ideas and collaboration to solve problems, and follow-up support such as startup growth technology development funds (up to KRW 120 million).
◆ Problem-solving (Top-Down) program
The problem-solving program is a type in which large corporations and other demanding companies submit collaborative tasks and startups solve the demanding companies' problems.
In advance, we utilized the SME technology roadmap to solicit and discover tasks in a total of four fields ('25.1), and selected 30 collaboration tasks from a total of 26 demand companies that wish to collaborate with startups.
The problem-solving program will select approximately 30 startups through two stages of evaluation (documents, presentations) and advanced consulting (mentoring).
◆ Self-suggestion type (Bottom-Up) program (private sector linkage type, cluster linkage type, free economic zone linkage type)
The autonomous proposal program is a program that supports collaboration between startups and large, medium, and public enterprises by linking with startup incubation programs operated by the private sector.
Starting this year, in order to promote balanced development, including regional economic revitalization, a track linked to free economic zones was newly established, and 20 collaborative projects (10 private-sector links, 7 cluster links, and 3 free economic zone links) with a total of 20 demand companies were selected.
The autonomous proposal program will publicly recruit startups to be carried out by large corporations for each task, and will recommend around 20 collaborative startups selected through self-evaluation, and support them in conjunction with the public-private cooperation open innovation support project.
Detailed information on the support project can be found in the project announcement on the K-Startup website and the Ministry of SMEs and Startups website .
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