Support for Private Institutions by Sector Including Management, Strategy, Technology, and Investment
Focused Policy Support for Finance, Export, and R&D
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is launching the 'Jump-up (Leap) Program' to select 100 promising small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and nurture them into mid-sized companies.
On the 7th, the Ministry announced that it will newly introduce the 'Jump-up Program,' a policy platform for comprehensive and systematic support, enabling promising SMEs to enter new growth sectors with high added value and development potential through collaboration and grow accordingly.
This program is operated based on cooperation with numerous specialized private institutions such as investors, research institutes, consulting firms, and advisory organizations, from the company selection stage to various growth supports, to maximize the utilization of private sector capabilities and expertise. The most notable feature is providing tailored, close support to selected companies for three years.
The 'Jump-up Program' first selects SMEs with excellent growth potential through an AI-based company analysis model from policy financial institutions and on-site inspections by a public-private joint evaluation team composed of investors and technical experts.
For companies that pass the first evaluation, the ‘Innovation Capability Evaluation Committee,’ consisting of academia, investors such as VCs, and management experts, conducts growth strategy presentations and in-depth discussions for each company, and finally selects support targets by unanimous agreement of the evaluators. Both the first and second evaluations are conducted using an absolute evaluation method.
Selected companies receive focused and close support for three years through a dedicated program. The dedicated program consists of three components: ‘Directing,’ ‘Open Voucher,’ and ‘Networking.’
Directing involves excellent experts in fields such as management, strategy, and technology providing dedicated support for each company, including management mentoring, scale-up strategy establishment, and technology development strategy establishment and consulting. To realize scale-up strategies and attempt commercialization for new businesses and new market entry, an open voucher worth 200 million KRW annually, up to 750 million KRW over three years, is issued to each company.
The open voucher will be operated to maximize company autonomy by broadly recognizing uses and applications such as certification, intellectual property acquisition, and marketing, excluding expense-type expenditures like labor costs.
The 'Jump-up Program' operates networking programs with domestic and international global investors and overseas expansion experts to directly support investment attraction and overseas expansion.
The investment attraction networking focuses on strengthening companies’ investment attraction capabilities such as IR know-how and pitching skills, followed by practical IR pitching competitions targeting policy fund operators, individual meetings with global investors such as VCs, and aims to connect these efforts to actual investment attraction results.
Reflecting each company’s overseas expansion needs, networking activities for overseas market penetration are also supported through overseas bases (GBC, KSC) by country and region, local experts, and local businesspeople, providing office space, localization, investment attraction activities, and securing business partners.
Policy packages such as finance, export, and research and development (R&D) that support companies’ challenges are also provided.
To secure scale-up (growth) funds at low interest rates and long terms, loan conditions such as loan scope and loan period are boldly relaxed, while industrial and corporate banks offer preferential interest rate loan programs, and ‘special guarantees’ with a maximum limit of 20 billion KRW are also supported.
To promote growth through private capital, the program includes the ‘Scale-up and Mid-sized Leap Fund’ as a primary investment target. For companies that find it difficult to issue corporate bonds alone, policy financial institutions such as the Small and Medium Business Corporation and Korea Technology Finance Corporation plan to provide linked support through bond-backed securities (P-CBO).
Additionally, various government policies are organically linked to alleviate financial burdens necessary for companies’ overseas expansion. This includes linkage with various R&D projects as well as preferential support for export finance such as export funds and export insurance.
Minister Oh Young-joo of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups stated, “The 'Jump-up Program' is a policy platform designed to fully support bold challenges and innovations of SMEs. We will not stop at one-way support but will continuously communicate and provide close support so that companies can achieve tangible results.”
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