Ministry of SMEs and Startups and Ministry of the Interior and Safety Jointly Promote 'Regional Innovation Contest Project'

Establishing a Collaborative System to Address Regional Depopulation

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced on the 10th that, together with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, it will promote the recruitment for the '2024 Regional Innovation Public Contest Project' to respond to the crisis of regional extinction. To address regional extinction, the government established the '1st Basic Plan for Responding to Population Decline Areas' in December last year and is actively promoting the revitalization of the living population through industry and job creation, improvement of residential conditions, culture, and tourism.

Since last year, the two ministries have been promoting the 'Regional Innovation Public Contest Project,' which closely links inter-ministerial policies with local government policies, and plan to discover innovative tasks targeting regions this year as well. The Regional Innovation Public Contest Project is conducted targeting 107 local governments, including 89 population-declining areas and 18 areas of interest. Basic local governments lead the establishment of strategies to respond to regional extinction, and for the finally selected tasks, support will be provided by linking regional SME support projects and the Regional Extinction Response Fund.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety supports the establishment of infrastructure such as youth startup centers, practice factories, and technical education centers that local SMEs can utilize through the Regional Extinction Response Fund. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups supports software-centered commercialization such as resolving technical difficulties for task advancement, demonstration and prototype production, certification, and marketing.

In the case of the 'Smart Farm Complex Construction' task selected last year in Buyeo-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, infrastructure such as a smart farmer technical education center and smart management practice factory will be established through the Regional Extinction Response Fund, and support for crop testing, product development, and prototype production will be provided through the Ministry of SMEs and Startups support projects. Buyeo-gun will also discover prospective smart farm entrepreneurs through its own projects and support on-site training and startup simulations.

This year, about 20 tasks will be preliminarily selected focusing on feasibility, effectiveness, and policy linkage. This is a significantly expanded scale compared to the 12 tasks last year. Kim Woo-jung, Regional Enterprise Policy Officer at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, said, "In a situation where the crisis of regional extinction is intensifying, it is more important than anything else to operate an all-out collaboration system between the central and local governments to realize the national goal of creating a livable local era anywhere in the Republic of Korea." We will concentrate our capabilities and actively support to breathe new vitality into regions facing the risk of regional extinction," he said.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.