At Mind the Bridge, governments, corporates and investors routinely ask the same question: how does their country stack up against the rest of the world? The difficulty lies in crafting a benchmark rigorous enough for cross-country comparison without erasing the distinctive traits that define each ecosystem.
This week in Seoul, Mind the Bridge presented its latest output — The Innovation Economy of South Korea — along with an explanation of how the exercise should be done.
The methodology treats every innovation ecosystem as a pyramid. At the base are venture-backed startups still building and proving their businesses. Above them sit scaleups — companies that have demonstrated enough traction to raise more than $1 million in venture capital — which serve as one of the most reliable proxies for ecosystem maturity because they can be plotted on the Innovation Ecosystems Life Cycle Curve by number, growth rate and sector mix. At the top are the outliers that carry disproportionate weight: scalers and super-scalers that have broken out of their home market and achieved genuine international scale. A handful of these can lift a country’s innovation profile far more than thousands of early-stage startups, which is why counting them separately rather than burying them in an aggregate figure is essential.
Alongside the VC-backed pyramid runs a second population: innovative SMEs — established, revenue-generating small and mid-sized companies that compete on technology and innovation rather than venture funding. In ecosystems like Korea’s, where corporate-led and government-backed innovation has historically mattered as much as the VC route, ignoring these companies would overlook a substantial portion of the real economy’s innovation capacity.
All these tech companies draw from the knowledge base generated by local universities and research centres. Together they form the technology supply side of the equation — but supply only translates into economic impact when it meets demand, represented largely by corporates and consumer markets.
As an ecosystem reaches critical mass — typically the Star stage of the Life Cycle Curve — it begins attracting external players. Investors, multinational corporations and government agencies establish local presence, drawn by proximity to talent, technology, deal flow and market opportunities. One measurable indicator of this attractiveness is the number of corporate and government innovation outposts set up by foreign entities.
Applying the framework to South Korea, Mind the Bridge counted 3,359 scaleups — making Korea the eighth-largest national innovation ecosystem in the world, with Seoul ranking as the 11th most developed globally. Below that layer sits a base of approximately 10,000 startups and an even broader base of roughly 25,000 non-venture-capital-backed technology companies.
The enabling infrastructure includes around 700 investors and more than 550 public and private innovation brokers running over 800 unique programs. On the demand side, roughly 130 local companies maintain structured open-innovation activities and about 90 international firms operate identified innovation outposts in South Korea.
All figures except the scaleup count — which is calculated analytically — represent best-effort assessments starting from government data and consolidated sources. The analysis is ongoing and will be refined as the ecosystem evolves.
A decade of divergence illustrates the result. Ten years ago, Korea was about 40% smaller than Japan and Germany and comparable to Australia and Spain. Today, with 3,233 scaleups recorded in 2025, Korea has pulled ahead of Germany and Japan, grown to more than double the size of Spain — its closest European peer in 2015 — and nearly doubled the size of Singapore.
The point of the exercise, according to Mind the Bridge, is not academic. The output is meant to tell a government where its ecosystem sits on the Life Cycle Curve, where bottlenecks lie and how it compares with peer economies transitioning from startup nation to scaleup nation. Get the methodology right, the numbers stop being a scoreboard and become a diagnosis.
