Taking it from the top
Enhancing basic science capabilities and goals is a key part of the national initiatives that President Park Geun-hye prioritized when she was elected in 2013 and outlined a vision of a “creative economy”. This effort is supposed to push the country's strengths in R&D — especially in information and communications technologies (ICT) — towards industrial application and help generate innovative products and services. To promote this, the Park government merged three agencies to establish the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, a new ministry designed to ease coordination within the government and overcome bureaucratic barriers. However, Sean Connell, an expert on South Korean research and development, who analysed the quest for a creative economy on behalf of the Washington-based Korea Economic Institute of America, says the restructuring was the third such reorganization of governance for South Korean science, technology and innovation in a decade and that its effectiveness is yet to be seen.
Supporting such reorganization and deriving results requires funding. To this end, in February 2014, President Park announced plans to increase Korea's R&D investments to represent 5% of its GDP by 2017, to further support the establishment of a creative economy. In recent years, the government has boosted its own R&D spending by an impressive average of 11% a year. This year's federal R&D expenditures are pegged at US$19 billion, up 5.9% from 2014. Within these expanding budgets, spending on basic research also will rise, to 40% of the total by 2017.
One project exemplifying the push into basic research is the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), which was launched in 2012. IBS focuses on big and sometimes risky research, historically not a particular strength of Korean science. Now 24 IBS research centres are up and running. In 2014, the government also pushed forward with plans to build a rare-ion accelerator — managed by IBS and funded at around US$2.1 billion through 2021 — for work in nuclear physics, materials science and biomedicine.