2024.06.11. The Fair Economy — The Ministry of SMEs and Startups and L'Oréal announced that, starting June 12, they will recruit digital and innovative technology startups wishing to join the "Big Bang" program, a collaboration with global companies.
Since signing an MOU in June last year to support startups in the beauty-tech sector, the Ministry and L'Oréal have maintained close cooperation, including jointly holding the "L'Oréal Open Innovation Contest." Starting this year, they plan to actively foster startups in digital and innovative technology fields applicable to beauty through the global corporate collaboration program.
The global corporate collaboration program is the Ministry's flagship public-private startup support initiative, launched in 2019. This year, the Ministry is selecting and supporting 305 promising startups together with 11 global companies, including Google and OpenAI. With L'Oréal joining, the number of global companies partnering with the Ministry to help foster domestic startups will rise to 12.
L'Oréal Korea plans to pilot the Big Bang program in cooperation with the Ministry starting in the second half of this year, supporting startups with digital and innovative technologies. The Big Bang program is an open innovation initiative that L'Oréal runs in the North Asia region, aimed at discovering and fostering startups with innovative, regionally scalable technologies applicable to the beauty sector. It began in China in 2020, expanded to Korea and Japan in 2023, and will also be run in Hong Kong and Taiwan this year.
The companies recruited through this Big Bang program call are startups in the digital field and the research and innovation field. In the digital field, the program will recruit startups with generative AI-based solutions capable of overseas expansion, such as ▲advertising video/image generation and data-driven automation of ad placement, ▲content search API services for video and images, and ▲conversational text-generation AI. In the research and innovation field, the program will recruit startups with ▲new ingredients or formulation technologies applicable to skin or hair that are activated by external stimuli, and ▲solutions involving technologies, ingredients or devices derived from medical platforms or procedures that can be applied to cosmetics and beauty.
Selected companies will receive mentoring, consulting, marketing and networking support from L'Oréal, as well as opportunities to collaborate with L'Oréal-affiliated teams. In addition, through evaluation, participating companies may join the following year's global corporate collaboration program and receive commercialization funding (up to 200 million won, about $145,000) and specialized programs from the Ministry.
Meanwhile, Lim Jeong-uk, director general of the Ministry's Startup and Venture Innovation Bureau, met the same day with Samuel du RETAIL, CEO of L'Oréal Korea, to discuss the direction of the Big Bang program. "As domestic beauty startups are leading the global K-beauty boom, I expect that collaboration between Korean startups and L'Oréal, a world-renowned beauty company, will create synergy," Lim said.
Startups wishing to join the global corporate collaboration Big Bang program can check the official notice on the K-Startup website (www.k-startup.go.kr) once it is posted, and apply on the same site from June 12 through 5 p.m. on July 3.
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