Scientific Competitiveness
The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) announced on May 22 that Korea’s competitiveness in scientific and technological infrastructures are the sixth and eighth highest in the world, respectively.
Korea climbed a notch from a year ago in terms of the competitiveness in scientific infrastructure. It had ranked fourth in 2010 and fifth in 2011 and 2012 in this assessment category. It jumped from 11th to eighth in the other segment to continue its upward movement from 18th in 2010 and 14th in 2012.
It has been found in this year’s report that Korea’s consistent efforts for higher R&D investment and the implementation of innovation policy have resulted in significant quantitative growth in the number of researchers, research papers, patents, exports of high-tech products, and R&D investment. However, the IMD also pointed out that there is still much room for improvement when it comes to the legal and systemic environments associated with intellectual property rights protection and cyber security, degree of satisfaction on the part of researchers, corporate capabilities for innovation, and cooperation between the academia and industry.