[DigitalToday reporter Lee Ho-jung] The Korea Creative Content Agency will revamp its support system for the K-content industry, focusing on expanding content intellectual property, overseas expansion and support for financing, talent and AI.

KOCCA on Wednesday announced four new strategies and 10 key tasks to make a new leap as a leading organisation that will drive the K-culture industry beyond K-content.

The four strategies are a renewed push as the overall agency for the K-culture industry, building a content IP powerhouse, strengthening growth engines for the content industry, and establishing a field-focused organisation and a future-response system.

KOCCA will first prepare a "K-culture export package" that bundles content with related industries such as food, cosmetics and fashion. It will support the entire export process from planning to overseas marketing, distribution and contracts. It also plans to expand its existing overseas promotional centre, Korea360, into a converged export space that covers both content IP and related industries.

It will also reorganise its overseas business centres, which currently operate in 28 locations in 25 countries, around regional hubs and linked bases. It will broaden support to cover market development, localisation, business matching, contracts, commercialisation and follow-up management. It will also build an integrated K-content information system that provides market, trade and legal information for each country.

It will also strengthen support for commercialising content IP. KOCCA will pursue a "Korean-style production committee" (tentative name) that selects strong IP and connects production companies with investors, financial institutions, platforms and domestic and overseas distributors. It also plans to link support programmes for planning, production, distribution, commercialisation and overseas expansion that are currently divided by genre.

It will also introduce KIPS, short for K-content IP Scale-up (tentative name), which combines private investment and government support. The programme is designed to help content companies with growth potential secure funding and attract IP investment.

It will also expand the scope of financial support. It plans to broaden the genres eligible for specialised loan support for content companies from broadcasting and video to games, animation and music, and to increase related funding by 10 billion won to 37 billion won.

It will expand field-based work experience support for new entrants to the content industry to about 1,000 people from about 200. It will also extend the support period to up to 10 months.

It will also strengthen research and development in cultural technology. KOCCA plans projects with a total budget of at least 100 billion won to develop technologies such as ultra-immersive and realistic performance technologies. It also plans to support the intelligence of cultural spaces such as museums and libraries and cultural and arts data.

It will also overhaul its evaluation system for support programmes. It will shorten the cycle for recruiting evaluation committee members and improve the competency evaluation method, among other steps, to strengthen selection evaluations centred on field experts. It also plans to raise organisational systems and staff expertise in line with changes in industry and policy.

According to a "2025 annual content industry trend analysis" cited by KOCCA, domestic content industry sales last year were 161.48 trillion won, up 2.6 percent from a year earlier, and exports were $14.91 billion, up 5.9 percent.

KOCCA head Kim Yoon-ji (김윤지) said, "Beyond strengthening support by genre such as broadcasting and video, games and music, we will establish a new growth foundation that connects K-content to K-culture by innovating the support system, including content IP expansion and overseas expansion, and support for financing, talent development and new technologies."