Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy Begins Overhaul of Government R&D Support Projects... Shift to Market-Oriented Focus

[Asia Economy Sejong=Reporter Dongwoo Lee] The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy has begun restructuring efforts to strengthen government research and development (R&D) support projects. The plan is to significantly expand autonomy by considering marketability from the planning stage and enhancing incentives for researchers.

According to the Ministry of Industry on the 11th, First Vice Minister Jang Young-jin held a meeting with R&D performing organizations including companies, universities, and research institutes at the Ministry's Sejong office. This meeting was a follow-up measure to the industrial technology innovation strategy announced by the Ministry last month, deciding to restructure R&D support projects to be performance-oriented.

The core of this R&D support project restructuring is to consider marketability from the planning stage of research tasks. To this end, a new one-stop type project will be introduced that plans tasks linked to business models (BM) directly proposed by companies, integrating original technologies (led by universities and research institutes) and subsequent commercialization technologies (led by companies). Additionally, integrated projects centered on final products (end products) jointly proposed by demand and supply companies will be expanded.

Incentives for outstanding researchers will be strengthened and autonomy in research execution will be greatly expanded. New grounds for technology fee reductions will be established for companies that produce excellent results, and a new “Top 10 Industrial Technology Excellent Companies” will be created to honor and boost morale of outstanding research performers through awards at the Industrial Technology Exhibition. To expand autonomy in research execution, the R&D autonomy track (which grants research autonomy such as changes in research goals and project budget settlements), previously limited to new technology development projects, will be extended to ongoing projects, human resource development, and infrastructure projects to create an environment conducive to focused research.

The expertise of R&D project evaluations will also be enhanced. The evaluation committee’s technology classification matching system will be refined from medium categories to subcategories, and the best experts will be appointed as evaluators by referencing past evaluation results (such as project termination after evaluation and the ratio of excellent evaluations). For challenging projects like the Alchemist Project, the evaluation panel will be composed of top authorities and given maximum autonomy in choosing evaluation methods (presentations, discussions, etc.).

First Vice Minister Jang Young-jin said, "We must inject commercialization innovation throughout the entire R&D process to create market outcomes worthy of the government’s 30 trillion won R&D investment," adding, "The government will strengthen the innovation capabilities of our companies and industrial competitiveness through institutional improvements such as deregulation of R&D."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.