On 1 January 2025, South Korea joined the current EU framework programme for research and innovation (FP) “Horizon Europe” as an associated country – and became the first ever Asian country associated to the FP.
This step has opened a wide range of collaboration opportunities for both European and Korean researchers and innovators. However, opportunities for Korean and European researchers to cooperate are not limited to the “Horizon Europe” framework only.
On 5 February, LINO office together with partners from Poland (The NCBR Office in Brussels – Business & Science Poland), Hungary (Eötvös Loránd University and Corvinus University of Budapest), and Slovenia (Business & Research Association) ran an information webinar, in which Mr Yale Song from the Korean-EU Research Centre (KERC) gave an overview of Korean RDI ecosystem and available collaboration opportunities for researchers.
–> Recording of the webinar is now available on LINO’s YouTube channel. We also offer a brief summary of some of the takeaways from Mr Song’s presentation below.
Generous R&I funding and consistently high achievements
South Korea is one of the largest investors to research & innovation globally. For example, in 2023 the budget of Korea’s National Research Foundation (NRF) was second only to the USA’s equivalent, and was larger than China’s (which stayed in the 3rd place). The largest investor to Korean RDI is the country’s private sector.
It comes as no surprise that Korea is also a global innovation leader that has for a number of years already been dominating top rankings in various global innovation scoreboards.
Korea in “Horizon Europe”
South Korea becoming an associated “Horizon Europe” country since January 2025 means that Korean researchers can now take part in and coordinate research projects in most areas of Pilar II of “Horizon Europe” and receive funding directly from the FP budget.
Although Korea has officially become an associated country this year, it has been taking part in various ways in EU’s earlier FPs since FP7.
It is worth mentioning that Korean & European researchers’ collaboration opportunities are not limited to Pillar II only. Although opportunities in Pillar II may be the most straightforward, Korean researchers (with their own funding) can also take part in e.g. Pillar I and ERA.
Collaboration opportunities beyond “Horizon Europe”
In addition to taking part in EU’s FP, South Korea has a number of bilateral research and innovation partnerships with individual EU countries and groups of countries (such as, for example, the so-called V4 group), as well as other international partnership initiatives.
One of the latter that deserves a separate mention is the Brain Pool programme, aimed at attracting international PhD holders to Korea for work/collaboration stays of up to 3 years at Korean research & innovation institutions. PhD holders from Europe currently are particularly encouraged to apply, as there is an underrepresentation of European participants in the programme, compared to those coming from other continents.
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Two more of our webinars about global collaboration opportunities for EU researchers are still to go:
- on 12 February we will be looking into EU-Canada cooperation opportunities for researchers, and
- on 6 March we will discuss cooperation between European and African researchers.
–> Register to attend both of them here!
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