민간부담금 (private contribution)

민간부담금 is the share a company participant must contribute to a Korean national R&D project from its own resources. Korean programmes expect for-profit participants to co-fund; the government share is not the project budget.

The proportion scales with company size. A large enterprise carries a substantially higher share than a small or medium one, on the reasoning that a bigger firm needs less public support for the same work. Exact rates are set by the programme and the announcement states them.

The part that surprises applicants is that a defined portion must be CASH rather than in-kind. A team that budgeted its contribution as researcher time discovers that only some of it counts and the rest must actually be transferred, a real outflow, on a schedule, during the project.

The rules on what may count as in-kind are specific: existing staff assigned to the project, equipment already owned, materials from stock, valued by prescribed methods rather than by estimate. Anything outside those categories is not a contribution.

Read the cost-share table in the announcement before treating the government share as the budget, and do the arithmetic in cash terms across the whole project duration. This is the Korean equivalent of the 30% an innovation action leaves with a European company, and it catches people the same way.