According to Yonhap News,

(SEOUL = Yonhap News) The Korean government will invest a total of KRW 2.6 trillion to foster 100 global software businesses by 2017.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) assembled the 6th National Science and Technology Council Steering Committee on February 27 and announced its software research and development (R&D) promotion initiative, which aims to achieve innovation in the software industry.

The MSIP plans to foster 100 world-class software businesses in a bid to create a virtuous cycle for the software R&D ecosystem.

To this end, the ministry will increase the allocated R&D budget for the software industry from 3.2 percent to six percent by 2017, and carry out large-scale projects including the “SW grand challenge project.”

The “SW grand challenge project” is a strategic government project to discover five large-scale projects that require long-term and large investments and high-level technologies by 2017 and an investment of up to KRW 1 trillion in the projects for up to 10 years.

The government will organize software workshops for businesses that have business ideas but lack development capabilities, and collaborate with the private sector to invest KRW 4 trillion by 2017 to carry out the global creative software project (GCS project), an action plan that focuses on supporting global software companies to become the top three companies in the global strategic software industry.

This year, a total of KRW 37.9 billion will be invested in 22 projects, including the development of the in-memory database management system and building information modelling.

The government also plans to have running eight software basic research centers by 2017. It will designate basic research centers in three different fields including the parallel computing operation system, machine learning and high confidence computing system, and support the research centers for the next eight years.

Next month, the government will hold a global software company forum and start to prepare policies to promote the commercialization of R&D results.

Small and medium-sized enterprises will be able to apply technologies developed by the government to their product development process from this year, as the government plans to make public some of its dormant technologies, ones that were developed in the public R&D process.

The government is also considering collecting license fees when a company develops a product using government technology and generates profits.

If its KRW 2.6 trillion investment project goes according to plan under the Park administration, the MSIP expects it will record KRW 4.4 trillion in production and generate KRW 2 trillion in added value and 64,000 employment opportunities.

“The software industry is the heart of the creative economy because it helps the nation realize creative ideas,” said Yoon Jong-lok, 2nd Vice Minister of the MSIP. “If the plan goes well, Korea will be able to foster the world-class software industry within the next four years.”