National R&D Innovation Act (국가연구개발혁신법)

The National R&D Innovation Act gave every Korean ministry one set of rules for research and development funding. Before it, participation conditions, cost categories, reporting formats and obligations differed by ministry, so a team moving between programmes relearned the paperwork each time and every specialised institution maintained its own interpretation.

The Act unified the framework: one definition of a participating organisation, one structure for cost sharing, one set of obligations after the award, one approach to results and their ownership. IRIS is the system built to operate it, and the two arrived together.

For a foreign reader this is the document that makes Korean calls comparable to one another. Once you understand the framework, an unfamiliar call from an unfamiliar institution is legible, because the categories are the same ones.

It did not open the system to foreign applicants. Most national R&D programmes still require a Korean legal entity as the lead research institution, with foreign organisations participating as partners on a Korean-led project. Some programmes are explicitly international and say so; the default is not.

It also standardised what happens to results and to unspent money, which is the part that matters at the end rather than the beginning. Obligations to report outcomes, and to return funds that were not properly spent, apply uniformly regardless of which ministry provided the budget.