South Korea developed its hydrogen strategies to achieve carbon neutrality and dominate the hydrogen economy amidst, and with the impetus, of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The government strives toward the goal via continuous investment in green hydrogen technologies, as well as strategic collaborations. To facilitate the transition into the hydrogen economy, this study presents a research and development (R&D) investment and collaboration framework as a national strategy. The framework offers abundant information to elucidate the technology, R&D spectrum, and regional dimensions of the strategy. Furthermore, the proposed framework was applied to the Korean hydrogen economy comprising 955 nationally funded projects worth USD 565.7 million. The statuses and trends of the government’s investment in nationally funded research projects are illustrated with regard to the value chains of the hydrogen economies of 16 regions, as well as nine technology clusters relating to the hydrogen economy, thereby determining the research organizations that played crucial roles in each cluster of the 16 regions between 2015 and 2020. The results indicate that the research organizations in Daejeon acquired the highest government R&D funding in many hydrogen-economy-related research fields, and that an R&D spectrum-based research/strategic collaboration is required to accomplish specialized complexes in the regions.

Since the South Korean government designated personalized medicine (PM) as a national strategic task in 2016, it has spared no investment to achieve its goals, which were recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study analyzed investment trends in 17 regions and eight technology clusters related to PM, consisting of 5727 public R&D projects worth USD 148.5 million, from 2015 to 2020. We also illustrated the level of investment for different PM-related technology clusters in each region; various research organizations explicitly verified comparable innovation capabilities for all eight technology fields in 17 regions, showing individual differences in technology areas per region. Our framework provided information to allow implementation of two goals: administering successful PM and improving regional equality in public health and healthcare according to technical and organizational levels. This study empirically demonstrates that it can provide a precise overarching innovation scheme with regional, technical, and organizational dimensions to establish collaboration among different stakeholders, thereby creating a foundation for an overarching national PM strategy.