Regional Innovation Policy of South Korea Compared With, and Learning From, The EU

This paper compares regional innovation policy of the Roh Moo-hyun administration, or so-called the "participatory government," of South Korea with that of the EU (European Union), with a view to drawing some lessons from the latter for the former. Since regional innovation policy of the participatory government has too short a period of time to have had substantial effects, it is too early to evaluate the performance of the policy. Also, Korea and EU are different in terms of territorial scale, which may make direct comparison more difficult than otherwise would be. Yet, it is still possible and desirable to compare regional innovation policies of the two, in terms of their underlying approaches to the subject and their governing models, if not in terms of their specific programs. Such a comparative exercise would be of special help to Korea, since Korea has recently begun to design and implement regional innovation policy with a fundamental shift in the policy paradigms for national development.