August 1998, Volume 7, Number 2
Contents
Short introduction to special section on quantitative studies for science and technology policy in transition economies
Anthony F J van Raan (University of Leiden, Netherlands)
Actual problems of Russia’s science and innovation policy Levan Mindeli (Ministry of Science and Technology of the Russian Federation)
Socio-economic condition of Russian scientists: challenge for policy-making Larisa Zubova (Ministry of Science and Technology of the Russian Federation)
Research and development in a service economy F D Gault (Statistics Canada)
Evaluation of research and technological development programmes: a tool for policy design
Gilbert Fayl, Yves Dumont, Luc Durieux, Isidoros Karatzas and Liam O’Sullivan (European Commission)
New challenges for indicators in science and technology policy-making: a European view
Jean Gabolde (European Commission)
Other articles
Do patents reflect the useful research output of universities? Keith Pavitt (University of Sussex)
Evaluation practices of scientific research in the Netherlands Jan van Steen and Marcel Eijffinger (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, The Netherlands)
Optimal incremental innovation: an evaluative approach for integrating R&D and marketing Asaf Ben Arieh (Disonics Ltd, Israel), Hariolf Grupp (Fraunhofer Institute, Germany) and Shlomo Maital (Technion, Israel)
The causes of the current crisis in Russian R&D are investigated along with the most important political decisions regarding new S&T policy in Russia. It is important that additional sources of funds and reserves are used efficiently, the network of R&D institutions is restructured, and S&T priorities are decided.
A survey of Russian R&D personnel involved about 2,400 researchers and specialists at 149 R&D institutions from the principal cities of ten administrative regions. The survey provides a possibility to picture the actual situation in the Russian R&D sector through opinions and assessments by participants in the scientific process.
This examines the sectoral distribution of expenditure on R&D performance in Canada (a service economy). Comparisons are made over time of the number of research workers in service and non-service industries, the ratio of professional to technical and other personnel, and the changes in educational levels of R&D personnel.
In 1994, the European Commission introduced a new scheme for the evaluation of its multi- annual research and technological development (RTD) programmes involving continuous monitoring and a five-year assessment. The recent assessment provided input to the preparation of the Fifth RTD Framework Programme of the EU.
Despite major EU efforts to bring together different S&T input and output indicators at European, national, regional and enterprise level, there is a large gap between the policy-makers’ needs and existing indicators. Evolution from a ‘linear’ to an ‘integrated’ science and innovation system calls for a new family of ‘systemic indicators’.
Patents granted to universities give a partial and distorted picture of the contributions of university research to technical change. However, citations in patents to published research papers, together with collaborative publications between universities and industry, offer rewarding sources of information on how university research contributes to technical change.
This takes stock of Dutch evaluation practices for publicly funded basic and strategic research in three contexts: institutional strategy formulation; allocative decision-making; and research and science policy strategy. The main challenge for science policy currently is to bridge the different evaluation practices, including integrating the societal point of view.
New operational definitions of incremental innovation, standard innovation, and radical innovation, are constructed using the ‘technometric benchmarking’ model. Based on this definition, optimal incremental innovation is formulated as a linear programming problem. The model is illustrated by an actual case: reconfiguration of a gamma camera.
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