"Support Even If You Fail"‥Yoon Seok-yeol Government's R&D Innovation Plan

Announcement of 'Yoon Seok-yeol Government R&D Innovation Plan' and 'Global R&D Promotion Strategy Leading the World'
Deliberated and finalized through the 3rd plenary meeting of the National Science and Technology Advisory Council

Minister Lee Jong-ho of the Ministry of Science and ICT is announcing the government's R&D innovation plan and global R&D promotion strategy at the Government Seoul Office Building on the afternoon of the 27th.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

On the 27th, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced the 'Yoon Seok-yeol Government R&D Innovation Plan' and the 'Global Leading R&D Promotion Strategy' that were reviewed and finalized at the 3rd plenary meeting of the National Science and Technology Advisory Council.

This plan focused on enhancing the efficiency of R&D expenditure while also enabling support for pioneering research that may have a risk of failure. To this end, the government decided to abolish evaluation grades that distinguish success or failure for challenging research and instead accumulate and share experiences and knowledge gained during the research process. It will also actively consider placing challenging R&D projects on a fast track for preliminary feasibility studies or exempting them from such investigations.

The compensation rate for researchers' technology fees will be raised from the current 50% to over 60%, and commercialization R&D will be supported for researchers holding excellent intellectual property (IP). The time required for contracts to introduce high-performance research facilities or equipment will be drastically reduced from the existing 120 days to 50 days.

The government plans to scale up research projects so that research funding is at least 100 million KRW. However, support for students and postdoctoral researchers, pure theoretical research, and conceptual research will maintain small-scale projects.

Investment in R&D for 12 major national strategic technologies will be maintained at around 5 trillion KRW annually, and R&D modeled after the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be increased.

Government-funded research institutes will be reorganized into a system centered on the 'National Technology Research Center' (NTC), a forward base for national strategic technologies, concentrating core research personnel and equipment. There is also a plan to partially reform the Project-Based System (PBS), which allows global-level researchers and NTC participating researchers to receive 100% of their labor costs and encourages researchers to secure external projects to cover labor and other expenses.

The Ministry of Science and ICT emphasized that this R&D innovation plan focuses on 'institutional innovation,' where challenging and innovative research is favored over manager-centered systems and regulations, and 'investment innovation,' shifting from short-term investments to investments centered on basic, foundational, and next-generation technologies.

Through this innovation plan, the government expects to increase the number of strategic technology fields at 90% of the world's top countries from 3 to 8 by 2027, and the share of top 1% cited papers to rise from 3.87% (2017?2021) to 4.8% (2022?2026).

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