From Promising Companies to Mid-sized Enterprises... Ministry of SMEs and Startups 'Jump-up' Recruiting 100 Companies

Support for over 7-Year-Old SMEs with New Business Plans
Including Directing and Open Vouchers for 3 Years

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced on the 17th that it will recruit companies to participate in the ‘Jump-Up Program’ for four weeks starting from the 18th.

This program provides comprehensive and systematic support to promising companies to scale up into mid-sized enterprises. It is a new project jointly announced by related ministries at the Economic Ministers’ Meeting in August to concentrate government and private sector capabilities for focused support. The Ministry plans to select 100 companies with excellent growth potential that can leap to mid-sized enterprises or mid-sized enterprise candidates.

The eligible applicants are SMEs with more than seven years of business experience that have plans to enter new businesses or new markets. There are no restrictions on industry, company size, or the field of new business or market entry. The intention is to broadly open the criteria to focus more on the company’s growth potential and the future development prospects of the business sector rather than external conditions.

Company recruitment will be conducted in two ways: open public recruitment and institutional recommendation. For open public recruitment, companies must apply directly within the recruitment period, while institutional recommendations will be received from private investment firms such as venture capital (VC), corporate venture capital (CVC), commercial banks, and regional institutions (Technoparks) to recommend promising companies.

The evaluation system is divided into two stages. Each stage operates on an absolute evaluation basis to select only companies with sufficient growth capabilities. In the first stage, experts in management, technology, and investment conduct a document review based on AI corporate diagnosis results and the company’s application documents, assessing the company’s technological innovation and growth capabilities. On-site evaluations are conducted only for companies that meet a certain threshold in the first stage. The second stage includes a presentation on the scale-up strategy and in-depth discussions by experts in each field. The selection of supported companies will be made by unanimous agreement of all evaluators.

Selected companies will receive support through four programs?directing, open vouchers, networking, and policy linkage?for three years. Through directing, composed of businesspeople, global consulting firms, and research institutions, companies will receive close support for three years in establishing new business directions and strategies, solving technical issues, and management consulting. To encourage bold new business challenges, open vouchers worth up to 250 million KRW per year and 750 million KRW over three years per company will be issued, which can be used for various commercialization costs. In addition to tailored capacity building for investment attraction, export, and localization for global expansion, opportunities to meet global investors such as VCs and CVCs, overseas companies, and buyers will be provided to generate visible business outcomes. Large-scale research and development (R&D), loans and guarantees, export financing, and other scale-up necessities will be organically linked with existing government policies.

Detailed project announcements can be found in the participation recruitment notices posted on the Ministry of SMEs and Startups website and the Small and Medium Business Corporation website.

Oh Young-joo, Minister of SMEs and Startups, said, “We will maintain steady interest and provide unwavering policy support for the 100 promising companies selected this time. After three years of support, we expect them not only to leap into global mid-sized enterprises but also to become leading models that will drive future new growth sectors, injecting vitality and dynamism into the overall economy.”