SEOUL, KOREA - The government will change the national R&D system that is currently losing money without producing tangible results. An official with the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning said on November 9, "Even though the amount of government R&D budget is rising every year, its commercialization performance is miserably low. We will come up with a new blueprint to renovate the current R&D strategy and report it to the President by next month." The ministry will hold a public hearing to discuss the issue of R&D system renovation on the 13th with representatives from industry, government, and academia.
This year's government R&D budget is 17.8 trillion won, up 3.5 percent from the previous year. This is the world's No. 1 in terms of ratio in the gross domestic products. In other quantitative criteria such as the number of patents applied and journal articles published, Korea is ranked No. 4 and 10 in the world, respectively. When it comes to commercialization performance, however, the figure is quite low. The ratio of technology royalties to the total R&D investment earned by domestic public research organizations is 1.5 percent, much less than a half of the United States (3.9%).
For example, the government recently decided to assign a budget of 578.8 billion won in eight years to a genetic analysis project. This is even smaller than a year's budget of a single private-sector research center in the United States. That's because the government agencies have to grant research budgets to all interested parties, which reduces the individual amount to a pittance.
Article provided by The Korea Economic Daily
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