Guest author Alberto Onetti, chairman of Mind the Bridge, shares how South Korea’s rise to the world’s eighth-largest national innovation ecosystem shows how sustained government investment, startup programs, regulatory reforms and deep-tech policies can transform an economy over time. At Mind the Bridge, we are regularly asked to put numbers on something that is, by nature, hard to pin down: the health of an innovation ecosystem. Governments, corporates and investors all want the same thing: A benchmark that tells them how their country or region stacks up against the rest of the world.

The problem is that no two ecosystems look alike, and any methodology rigid enough to allow cross-country comparison risks flattening exactly the traits that make a place distinctive. This is the tension we have been working on for years, refining a model that is standard enough to compare Boston with São Paulo, Tel Aviv with Turin, yet flexible enough to capture what is genuinely different about each. This week in Seoul, we presented the latest application of that work: The Innovation Economy of South Korea.

It’s a good occasion to lay out, briefly, how we think the exercise should be done. Start from the Pyramid Every innovation ecosystem can be represented as a pyramid. At the base sit startups: venture-backed technology companies still in the process of building and proving their business.

Move up and the base narrows into scaleups, or companies that have shown enough traction to raise more than $1 million in venture capital. Scaleups are the most structured, most visible output of an ecosystem, and for that reason they are among the best proxies for its maturity: You can plot their number, growth rate and sector mix against the Innovation Ecosystems Life Cycle Curve and get a reasonably honest read of where an ecosystem stands. At the very top of the pyramid are the outliers that matter disproportionately: scalers and super-scalers, companies that have broken out of their home market and achieved real international scale.

A handful of these can do more for a country’s innovation profile than thousands of early-stage startups — which is why counting them separately, rather than burying them in an aggregate “startup” number, is essential to any serious methodology.