Busan Joins Global Startup Rankings—but Falls Behind Asia’s Innovation Leaders

Busan, South Korea - Busan has officially joined the list of the world’s top 100 emerging startup ecosystems, according to the 2025 Global Startup Ecosystem Report (GSER) by Startup Genome. The city was placed in the 81–90 ranking bracket, above Fukuoka and close behind Wuxi, signaling its first entrance into the global innovation landscape. For a city traditionally known for its port, manufacturing, and logistics industries, the inclusion marks a notable shift in ambition.

But beneath the celebratory headlines lies a more complex truth. While Busan’s debut reflects rising visibility, the city’s internal scorecard paints a portrait of imbalance. Of the five key indicators that GSER uses to assess ecosystems—Knowledge, Funding, Performance, Talent & Experience, and Market Reach—Busan achieved a high score of 8 out of 10 only in Knowledge. In every other category, it scored between 1 and 4. These figures suggest a research-driven city that is struggling to convert intellectual capital into marketable innovation.

The GSER 2025 placed Busan within the 81–90 ranking tier, ahead of Fukuoka, and loosely aligned with Chinese industrial cities such as Wuxi and Nanjing. This positioning provides global visibility, but also highlights the city’s fragile fundamentals. Busan’s scorecard is lopsided. The city earned a surprisingly high score of 8 in the Knowledge category, a metric tied to research output and intellectual property, yet failed to achieve more than 4 points in any of the other core pillars of the ecosystem: Funding (4), Talent & Experience (1), Performance (1), and Market Reach (1). These metrics expose a systemic weakness in the city's ability to convert knowledge into entrepreneurial or commercial outcomes.

This becomes clearer when compared to other cities within the same geographic and economic cohort. Seoul, Busan’s capital counterpart, ranks among the Top 30 globally. It scored highly across all categories in GSER 2025, driven by a dense concentration of startup activity, consistent unicorn generation, and a mature capital market. Unlike Busan, Seoul has established a self-reinforcing cycle of innovation: serial founders reinvesting in new ventures, a competitive VC landscape, and strong linkages between public R&D and private enterprise.

Jakarta, ranked significantly higher in the 61–70 tier, demonstrates a different model of success. Despite infrastructure limitations and regulatory complexity, Jakarta has cultivated several globally scaled startups such as Gojek and Tokopedia, which in turn fueled confidence among international investors. These landmark exits created liquidity and experience, which Jakarta has reinvested into its startup fabric. The Indonesian capital may lack Busan’s research credentials, but its dynamism and market-driven momentum have proven more impactful in GSER’s scoring model.

Fukuoka, another regional peer, shows how focused policy can yield startup gains despite size constraints. The Japanese city introduced early foreign-founder visa programs and concentrated heavily on community-building within its ecosystem. Though Fukuoka remains ranked below Busan in GSER, it outpaces it in Performance and Talent, largely due to the success of its founder-first approach and early-stage support networks.

In this comparative landscape, Busan is something of an outlier. It possesses the industrial base of a major city, the research muscle of a university town, but the startup activity level of a much smaller market. Its Knowledge strength, rather than indicating an integrated startup ecosystem, underscores its isolation. Research stays in the lab. Patents are rarely commercialized. And talent, when developed, often migrates elsewhere—usually to Seoul or overseas.

City officials are aware of these limitations. In response, Busan is investing in initiatives such as the Fly Asia expo—a regional startup conference meant to bridge local startups with global investors—and a newly signed MOU with Plug and Play, the world’s largest private accelerator based in Silicon Valley. These programs aim to infuse global capital, mentorship, and visibility into Busan’s early-stage landscape. However, without foundational change in how Busan’s ecosystem operates, these initiatives risk becoming superficial showcases rather than substantive growth engines.

The next challenge for Busan is to establish a coherent "innovation stack"—the layered infrastructure of early-stage capital, founder education, international partnerships, and policy incentives that cities like Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Seoul have built over years. Right now, Busan has the components but lacks the assembly. The disconnection between R&D and commercialization remains too wide. The talent drain continues. And despite some policy attention, Busan has yet to foster the reinvestment culture—where exits feed the next generation—that defines thriving ecosystems.

In the end, Busan’s entry into the GSER Top 100 should be viewed as a diagnostic more than a destination. It validates the city’s potential but exposes the barriers that prevent it from becoming a truly global startup city. Compared to Seoul’s full-stack innovation engine, Jakarta’s entrepreneurial explosiveness, and Fukuoka’s policy precision, Busan stands as a research-heavy but outcome-light ecosystem.

The path forward is not impossible, but it is narrow. Busan must do more than host expos and sign MOUs. It must rewire its innovation institutions to reward risk, connect capital with research, and build ecosystems that retain talent rather than export it. Only then can it move from a city of potential to a city of momentum.