Over the past decade, South Korea has emerged as one of the world's fastest-growing innovation ecosystems. Just 10 years ago, the country had around 200 scaleups ' today, that number has grown tenfold to more than 2,100. This remarkable growth has been fueled in large part by strong government policies, which not only supported startup creation but also introduced clear KPIs around innovation. The most visible initiative is the Global Unicorn Project, launched in 2019 by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, which introduced structured categories such as 'baby unicorns' and 'pre-unicorns' as part of a national innovation roadmap. According to the Tech Scaleup South Korea 2025 Report ' produced by my organization, Mind the Bridge in conjunction with Crunchbase and which you can download here ' Korea is on track to overtake Japan in the number of scaleups (2,127 vs. 2,268). A decade ago, Australia had a slightly larger scaleup base than Korea (281 vs. 228), while Japan had twice as many...
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