Fifth Place
The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning and the Korea Institute of Science & Technology Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP) announced on Dec. 20 that Korea ranked high among 30 OECD member countries in terms of innovation capabilities in the field of science and technology.
The ministry and KISTEP have analyzed and compared Korea’s innovation capabilities in this field each year since 2006. Specifically, the assessment is made up of 13 items in the five segments of resources, environments, networks, activities and outcomes. They use 31 detailed indices in drawing up the Composite Science & Technology Innovation Index (COSTII) and compare the result with those of the 30 OECD member countries excluding Israel, Chile, Estonia and Slovenia.
In this year’s assessment, Korea moved up from ninth to sixth in resources, from 11th to 8th in networks and from 10th to 8th in outcomes. It maintained the second place when it comes to activities and climbed one notch to 22nd in environments.
Korea was found to be doing well as far as budget and manpower inputs and patent production are concerned, while lagging behind most of the other countries with regard to qualitative performances such as inter-enterprise technological cooperation, protection of intellectual property rights and technology exports with respect to R&D investments. The ministry and KISTEP pointed out that the relatively poorer qualitative indices imply that Korea’s policy in this field is failing to produce practical results.