Documento(s) 6 de 17

Policy advice 

Need for policy integration 

We are aware of many interpretations on how the proposal in the May 1995 Decision on Accelerating Scientific and Technological Progress (Box 2) to create "a leading state science and technology group ... to strengthen overall policy making and management related to scientific and technological work throughout the country" will be implemented. Any such leading group could certainly help by looking into the question of policy integration.

Box 2

The Decision on Accelerating Scientific and Technological Progress (6 May 1995)  The Decision on Accelerating Scientific and Technological Progress (see National Affairs 1995) is based on 11 major points, some of which are supplemented by a series of principles. The major points are the following:   Implementing the idea that Science and Technology are primary productive forces in all fields;  Energetically push forward scientific and technological progress in agriculture and rural areas;  Improve the quality and efficiency of industrial growth through advances in science and technology;  Develop high-technology and its industries;  Promote scientific and technological progress in social development;  Firmly tighten basic research;  Continue to restructure science and technology management and establish a new system of science and technology management, compatible with the socialist market economic system and the law of scientific and technological development.  Train a contingent of highly qualified scientific and technical workers and enhance the whole nation's scientific and technological level;  Increase science and technology inputs through various channels and at different levels;  Further opening up China to the outside world and extensively launching international scientific and technological cooperation and exchanges;  Effectively strengthening Party and Government leadership over scientific and technological work.

Setting research priorities 

In recent years, the more-industrialized countries have developed quite sophisticated priority-setting techniques in which criteria relevant to market considerations are integrated with scientific criteria. Governments have an important role to play in facilitating these priority-setting exercises, although members of the scientific and business communities also play important roles in their conduct. 

The term research foresight is often applied to these activities, and different countries have evolved techniques appropriate to their own domestic situations. The Japanese were early pioneers in the development and application of these approaches; more recently, the UK government has facilitated a major foresight study in the United Kingdom; the South African government is about to launch a foresight study in South Africa; and Australia has also developed some original approaches for setting research priorities. 

Given China's commitment to investing in research that will yield benefits to the Chinese economy and society within 10­15 years, the Mission believes that some of these more sophisticated priority-setting techniques might be usefully applied in China. 

A national system of innovation 

We have included in Part II a first attempt to identify the outlines of China's NSI. In our approach, we place emphasis first on identifying the functions of an NSI and then on identifying the stakeholders whose interests are affected by the system. Any analysis of the functions of an NSI (see Table 2) needs to take into account the following: 

• Policy and resource-allocation functions; 
• Regulatory functions; 
• Financing functions; 
• Performance functions; 
• HRD and capacity-building functions; and 
• Infrastructure functions. 

• Policy-making institutions; 
• The principal S&T institutions; 
• New organizational forms created by the reform process; 
• Organizations of the scientific community; 
• Relevant financial institutions; and 
• Regulatory bodies. 

Models of R&D and innovation 

The practical consequence of belief in this model is that institutions and programs tend to be situated at discrete points along this spectrum, specializing in one or other activity, and tend to be organized along lines of scientific discipline (for example, institutes of basic research in some aspect of physics). 

Other models of the innovative process that have been developed seek to incorporate the ideas of market pull and of the need for interaction among a whole range of technical activities that are seen to contribute to innovation in a modern enterprise. The latest attempt to understand the innovative process -- and hence to be able to prescribe ways of enhancing the innovative performance of enterprises or institutions -- is the system integration and networking model. An Australian review of innovation studies (Tegart 1995, p. 1) underlined the point that current models of the innovative process 

emphasise that innovation should be viewed as a team effort, with formal and informal networking as the crucial factor in transferring knowledge amongst participants. These models recognise that there can be both long-term and short-term outcomes of the innovation process and that different technologies induce different patterns of innovation and diffusion, including new interdisciplinary groupings. 

The [so-called] fifth-generation innovation process [Figure 3] identifies the need for firms to be systematically innovative in all of their activities. This includes their linkages with customers, suppliers, information sources, research providers and all the various parts of their networks. In particular, the growing interdependence of national economies -- so-called globalization -- means that these linkages must be global as well as national. 

The reference in Figure 3 to the value chain is to the technological trajectory followed by innovative enterprises as they continually seek to introduce greater added value to the products or services they offer on the market. 

In industrialized countries, much attention is paid to fostering the creative interactions among people doing research, design, and production, and this has led to the creation of new groupings of scientists and engineers -- in networks and consortia -- and to significant investments in research at the frontiers of science in areas considered to be likely sources of future technological development of economic or social importance (strategic research). China should carefully examine the utility of this experience as it moves to further institutional reform in its S&T system. 

Role of national key laboratories, ERCs, and national research centres 

• The designation of a series of national key laboratories -- This program began in 1984, and today 155 such laboratories have been identified, 50 of which are located in CAS institutes. Selection of laboratories to be so designated involved a peer-review process organized by NNSF, and the final decisions were jointly made by SSTC and SPC; 
• The establishment of an extensive series of ERCs, proposed as vehicles for improving the transfer of domestic and foreign technology to enterprises⁶ -- To date, SSTC has established 25 out of a planned 56 ERCs, and the World Bank has given approval for the financing of 46; and 
• The establishment, during the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1996­2000), of a series of at least 10 national research centres, which appear to come in three types: 
• The geographically distributed network, in which institutes and laboratories in different locations form linkages among their activities, 
• The consortium in a common location, in which different organizations (national key laboratories, university institutes, CAS institutes) join together in a common effort to define a joint research program based on the strengths of the different participants, and 
• The new centre in new facilities, a costlier version that involves investment in new physical plant. 

The various ERCs appear to have been selected in a competitive process, with individual institutions of many types making proposals to the sponsoring commissions. This approach has the merit of basing the ERCs on established technological capability but gives rise to questions about the extent of national coverage that will be achieved, even with more than 100 such centres eventually being set up. The Mission could find no evidence of any concern to understand the geographic dispersion of the centres -- are they located in places that give them easy access to the enterprises most likely to need their services? What kind of outreach capacity will the centres have to take their services to potential clients? What kind of networking will be promoted to allow the set of centres to respond quickly to client needs? 

For the medium term, a larger question arises. Will these ERCs, at some future date, be elements of a national system of technical support to Chinese enterprises? If such a system were to emerge, how would it be organized? How would its activities be financed? What range of services would it offer? From experience in both industrialized and developing countries, the five most common needs of small- and medium-scale enterprises (of which there must be many in China) are the following: 

• Access to finance [and China has already a variety of schemes at the national, provincial, and municipal levels]; 
• Access to management training; 
• Access to market information and to markets; 
• Access to skills upgrading for employees affected by technological change in the workplace; and 
• Access to best-practice technology, with best practice defined in terms of the acquiring enterprise's capacity to absorb the technology in question. 

• The Manufacturing Extension Partnership, operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States; 
• The Industrial Research Assistance Program of the National Research Council of Canada; 
• The Technology Adoption Program of the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research; and 
• The technology-commercialization activities of the Fundación Chile. 

The introduction of the concept of the national research centres, as the Mission understands them, offers opportunities to involve the most progressive of Chinese enterprises in the new forms of joint activity now common in industrialized countries. Much strategic research (that is, research at the frontiers of knowledge in fields of S&T believed to be important to future social or economic performance) is now carried out by networks or consortia of R&D institutions, and in most countries these consortia include government research institutions, universities, and enterprises. If China takes steps to involve enterprises in the new national research centres -- both in their governance structures and in their research teams -- it would be creating powerful institutional means to draw on the traditional strengths of the national key laboratories and the emerging skills of the ERCs in creative ways to focus enterprises' interests in their own long-term development. This, the Mission believes, is an opportunity worth exploring. 

Good examples of new forms of collaboration are to be found in 

• The Australian Co-operative Research Centres Program, funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Technology; 
• The Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence Program, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and 
• The industrial R&D consortia operated under the US federal National Cooperative Research Act of 1984. 

Human-resource issues 

We were impressed with the extent to which this legacy is recognized in China today and by the steps that are being taken to remedy it. The measures mainly call for retirement of older scientists; transfer of others from research to routine activities; some retraining of middle-aged scientists; and special inducements, rewards, and early promotions for younger and middle-aged scientists with expertise. 

There also seems to be a long-term view on the brain drain. When the open-door policy was introduced, many Chinese scientists were sent overseas for further education and training. Many decided to remain overseas, especially following the events of June 1989. Despite this loss, China decided to maintain the flow of scientists going overseas. Today that policy seems to be paying off. The Mission heard of many younger scientists who have returned to senior positions. Others are encouraged to return to give lectures or to develop collaborative research programs involving Chinese institutions and their own foreign institutions. 

No other country has been faced with such a legacy, which at the same time provides huge opportunities and responsibilities for the younger generation. How well the aftermath of that legacy is managed will be one determining factor in how well China can implement its ambitious policies. 

Some benefits and costs of the S&T reforms for research institutions 

Some benefits of the reforms 

• They provided mechanisms to permit the best researchers to concentrate on research and to allow others to be usefully employed in "spin-off enterprises." 
• They increased mobility of researchers, which allows top institutes to attract top scientists. 
• They required institutions to find new ways of linking their work to societal needs. 
• They provided peer-review mechanisms for concentrating resources in the best groups. 
• They put heavy emphasis on encouraging talented young and middle-aged scientists. 
• They provided more opportunities for returning Chinese scientists. 

Some costs of the reforms 

• They led to commercially unskilled scientists trying to become entrepreneurs and enterprise managers, with, as a consequence, many enterprise failures. 
• They led to a move of bright young scientists away from basic research because financial rewards are potentially higher for applied research, which has created more opportunities for employment with new enterprises. 
• They led to rewards within institutions being preferentially for those who can "sell their services and tech
• They led to the directors of many institutes having little opportunity to direct because individual researchers exploit the market to find funds to support their own research. 

Some key unresolved issues 

• There are still too many government research institutes. 
• Too many institutes are overstaffed. 
• Some important new tendencies in the global organization of S&T have still not been fully grasped or institutionalized in China. 

Some final observations 

We share the view that S&T is the driving force behind contemporary economic development and that S&T has great potential to contribute equally to social development, provided that its development and application are carefully managed. 

Given China's enormous population and the limitations that it faces in its available arable land, we agree that high priority has to be given to agricultural development through R&D; the two major concerns in this area to which China should pay attention are the need to have policy statements backed up by appropriate budgetary expenditures, both by governments and by enterprises, and the need to turn the large array of existing agriculture-related S&T institutions into an efficient and effective system. 

To tackle the problems of accelerating industrial growth through technological innovation, China's NSI needs to evolve into an interactive system, ending the tradition of institutional isolation. There is also a need to pay greater attention to the effective assimilation and mastery of imported technology, an essential precursor to having enterprises become a continuing source of innovative activity. 

Becoming an increasingly innovative society requires that government create a policy environment that fosters creativity and investment. This in turn requires that all of the principal policy-making bodies of government work together to consciously integrate the many elements of government policy into the desired whole. 

The Mission is in favour of the policy of continuing to support research at the forefront of scientific knowledge. We believe that China has the capacity not only to undertake ventures in big science but also to develop a strong tradition of strategic research that is closely linked to China's short-term programs of technological development. For this, some institutional realignment will be needed. A look at international experience in designing research consortia should also be helpful. 

We are strongly in favour of the openness that has been developing in China's S&T system over the last decade, and we see the exposure of young Chinese scientists to foreign ways of doing and managing science as being crucial to China's own efforts. 
 

Documento(s) 6 de 17