Working to build a 'creative economy', the country has boosted its significant science spending with researchers particularly focusing on nanotechnology, nuclear fusion and stem-cell research.
ARTICLE COUNT (AC): 1,966
FRACTIONAL COUNT (FC): 1,232.24
WEIGHTED FRACTIONAL COUNT (WFC): 1,167.49
South Korea is often called the world's most innovative country. Last year, for example, it beat Sweden and the United States to claim first place in Bloomberg's 2014 Global Innovation Index. If its endeavours are measured by financial commitment, South Korea is shining. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Science, Technology and Industry Outlook 2014 shows the country spent 4.4% of its GDP on R&D in 2012, leading the world. The Battelle Institute's estimates have South Korea's total R&D spending at about US$63 billion in 2014. The lion's share of these funds goes into industrial work led by giants, such as Hyundai and Samsung. But South Korean researchers also are making increasingly important contributions in basic and applied research, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to nuclear fusion and from stem cells to space science, and boosting efforts to transfer their advances to industry.
An educated workforce is key to achieving scientific and technological success, and this is Korea's greatest strength, according to Sung-Mo Kang, president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon. He points out that more than 65% of young people graduate from college — compared to only about 40% of the entire US population.
However, observers inside and outside South Korea advise that getting the most from this well-educated workforce will require more ambitious basic research programmes; Korean scientists historically have published relatively few papers in leading scientific journals. “Today, Korea faces a new challenge in the field of basic research: the country has attained a goal in terms of growth, but it needs to improve its quality of research,” researchers from Chungnam National University and the National Research Foundation of Korea noted in a 2014 paper. “Korean researchers need to demonstrate excellence, a far more critical issue than the number of papers published.” In 2014, for example, only 0.6% — compared to a global average of 3.1% — of its papers were published in Nature or Science.
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.