Itzhak Goldberg, Ph.D., Jean-Louis Racine, Ph.D., John Gabriel Goddard, Ph.D., Natasha Kapil, MA, and Smita Kuriakose, MA. Europe and Central Asia, World Bank, 12020 Montrose Village Terrace, Rockville, MD 20852
R&D Institutes –Unfinished Restructuring Agenda in Transition Countries
Objectives
This study aims to address the importance of the restructuring and exit of existing public R&D institutions (“exit”). The existing Research and Development institutes (RDIs) in ECA are a relic of central planning mostly supported by the state budget. They perform little applied research and conduct research that is hardly relevant to the needs of the productive sector.
Restructuring and/or exit of RDIs is important because they crowd out new R&D institutions and innovative SMEs. There are several reasons for the crowding out: (i) funds to the new instruments (e.g. matching grants) are limited because government funds go to state RDIs; (ii) the IPRs of researchers who move from RDIs to become private entrepreneurs and establish innovative SMEs are unclear; (iii) the mobility of researchers from RDIs to new institutions is constrained by pension rights in the RDIs; (iv) researchers who attempt to spin out are immediately at a disadvantage as they become subject to commercial tax codes and business environment barriers, whereas those in RDIs remain sheltered under special public status exemptions. While market failures may provide a case for public support of R&D, they do not necessarily imply that such public support to R&D should take the form of funding publicly owned and managed RDIs. Data/Methods
Questionnaires and follow up interviews have been conducted in Russia, Poland, Serbia and Croatia in issues related to science and technology policy. The case studies based on interviews examined (a) the characteristics that are expected to play a determinant role on the technology commercialization institutions’ contribution to technology diffusion and innovation in the productive sector, and (b) performance measures of the technology commercialization institutions. Technology commercialization institution characteristics that are expected to be important include their organizational structure, institutional governance and autonomy, legal framework, resources, internal incentive structures and approach to income generation. The performance of the institutions has been assessed through a number and types of contracts with industry and their ability to raise competitive funding.Results/Expected Results
The case studies will be used to explore links between the inherent characteristics of ECA technology commercialization institutions and their performance, and to assess differences between ECA technology commercialization institutions and best-practice institutions in other regions. The questionnaires have been designed so that approximately half of the results can be compared to publicly-available results from previous surveys of international technology commercialization institutions.
Preliminary analysis from Russian RDIs indicates that the level of industry-science collaboration is low and is not the focus existing RDIs. This is not surprising since in the past all these RDIs were “branch” R&D institutes fully financed by the government. These preliminary results show that there are also several external obstacles hampering science-industry collaboration: (i) financial barriers for RDIs to commercialize (especially in the area of patenting and licensing); (ii) legal barriers to establishing small innovative enterprises.