KITA to upgrade "Innobranch" - its nurturing platform for startups 

Korea International Trade Association (KITA) announced on September 2nd that it will upgrade the functions and services provided by “Innobranch” ？ a platform created in December 2019 by KITA to support open innovation and collaboration between startups and large & mid-sized companies from home and abroad. Global top companies such as BMW, Daimler, Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs are partnering with startup from Korea and elsewhere through Innobranch in various forms of business collaborations.

“Fortune 500 Connect” ？ a key service provided by Innobranch played a crucial role in successfully connecting more than 770 home-grown startups with top Fortune 100 companies, such as Porsche, Bayer and Amazon. This service is delivering successful results ？ attracting investment, technological collaboration, product exports and signing partnership agreements. Only a year into launching “Fortune 500 Connect”, it saw more than 200,000 visits, and more than 10,000 startups from Korea and aboard are regularly taking advantage of this service.

Such success stories recently led to increased requests by global companies asking for collaboration with Korean startups. This prompted KITA to upgrade Innobranch, which will start this month until February next year.

The upgrade will allow KITA to categorize models of open innovation and develop & introduce collaborative models for each category by utilizing the global open innovation trend and overseas market penetration by startups. KITA also plans to go beyond employing corporate-level methods and introduce Cross Border Testing (CBT) ？ a testbed exchange project among nations and plans to expand the size of empirical projects and regularly implement upgrade projects.

Pil-jae Park, the Director of Global Startup Acceleration Department pointed out that, “The existing overseas empirical testbed projects have shortcomings as only a limited number of startups can have access to opportunities” and added, “The CBT program can resolve this issue.” He expressed commitment to “improve Innobranch to the next level as a globally renown platform by introducing new types of open innovation models along with upgrading Innobranch.”

[This news is provided by Newsis]