Executive Summary
This report recognizes that overseas expansion has become a necessity for
Korean software companies as global digital transformation and technological
competition intensify. While demand for digital technologies such as artificial
intelligence, data, platforms, and cybersecurity continues to grow, firm-centered
overseas expansion strategies face structural limitations due to regulatory and
market complexity, as well as rising requirements for trust and reference
acquisition. In addition, existing support policies—such as vouchers, consulting,
and information provision—have mainly supported early-stage market
exploration, with limited impact on actual project execution and market
settlement. The report therefore examines cooperative overseas expansion as a
practical alternative and classifies it into public–private and private–private
collaboration models. These models differ in government roles, collaboration
structures, and approaches to overseas markets. The Netherlands’ Partners for
International Business(PIB) program represents a public–private model that
facilitates industry-level collective expansion through government-backed
credibility and networks, while Germany’s Export Initiative Environmental
Protection(EXI) illustrates a private–private model in which firms form consortia
to directly implement overseas projects with the government acting as a
facilitator. The analysis shows that cooperative overseas expansion improves
market entry feasibility by strengthening trust, dispersing risks, and enabling
integrated solutions. Based on these findings, the report suggests that Korean
software companies should strategically design cooperative expansion models
suited to market and technological characteristics, and that government policies
should focus on fostering collaborative structures to support sustainable overseas
expansion.