A colloquium was prepared to discuss ways to promote innovative R&D activities and to enhance R&D investment strategies of the government.
 
 
KISTEP held ‘The 6th NIS Policy Colloquium’ under the theme of “Where should R&D evaluation head for the future of Korea?” on September 26th (Fri), 2019.
 
 
Although the atmosphere emphasizing efficiency and productivity of R&D has led performance-centered evaluation systems so far, doubts persist over whether this evaluation system could work efficiently in future R&D environment. Therefore, this colloquium focused on the importance of the R&D supporting system that can lead creation and innovation in new environments such as the 4th industrial revolution, and the presentations and the panel discussion were preceeded under the theme of development direction of R&D evaluation systems, the important factor of R&D systems.
 
 
President Sang-seon Kim mentioned that “Recently the notion is getting more concreted that R&D is the crucial factor for improving national competitiveness, so the very important issue is how to prepare supporting systems that can lead innovative performances” in his opening address. Then he clarified that “This colloquium is expected to be useful for developing R&D evaluation systems but also for promoting innovation in R&D systems.”
 

 

▲ Sang-seon Kim (President, KISTEP)

 


The presentations consisted of (1) Methods and applications of policy evaluation in S&T (Professor Ji Woong Yoon, Kyung Hee University) and (2) Diagnosis of governmental R&D evaluation systems and suggestions for innovation (Policy Advisor Young-Soo Ryu, Research Institute of S&T Innovation and Strategy, KISTEP). Professor Yoon introduced various concepts and scopes according to policies, and explained various methods for policy evaluation, developed and advanced by properly appling them to S&T areas, by evaluation stages and by research areas. Moreover, he emphasized that “It is necessary to discuss categorizing S&T policies in various aspects to secure effectiveness of policy evaluations, and to have time to consider evaluation systems and methods for S&T policies to be helpful to create adventurous and innovative performances.”
 

 

▲ Ji Woong Yoon (Professor, Kyung Hee University)

 
 
 
Policy advisor Ryu presented that “The best surviving strategy is to gain competitive advantages as a first mover by following up the speed of technology development in the innovative condition of accelerated technology confusions” and asserted that reorganization of R&D structures and evaluation systems to lead those is urgent. Also he added that “The performance-centered evaluations securing accountability, regarded as the universal value so far, are hard to work longer.” For the grand shift to ‘Evaluations crediting innovation values’, he gave suggestions for developmental R&D evaluation systems, and emphasized the necessity of ▲abolition of high-level evaluations(projects), reorganization to analytic aspect of performance evaluation, ▲simplified project unit evaluation system to ‘mid-term evaluation-follow-up study(integrated end evaluation),’ ▲strengthening the function of specific evaluations to proactive response perspectives to solve policy problems, ▲shift to R&D policy follow-up evaluations and researcher-centered follow-up studies, ▲evaluations to respond to multidisciplinary convergence research activities, ▲shift from scoring methods when evaluating results to sharing performances and issues .
 

 

 

▲ Young-soo Ryu (Policy Advisor, Research Institute of S&T Innovation and Strategy, KISTEP)

 
 
 
The panel discussion was led by ▲Jang-Jae, Lee (Director, Research Institute of S&T Innovation and Strategy, KISTEP), and with 7 panels of ▲Hong Keun GIL (Secretary general, National Research Council for Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences), ▲Jaemin Park (Professor, Konkuk University), ▲Hyun Sil Ahn (Editorialist, The Korea Economic Daily), ▲Youngkyun Oh (Professor, The University of Suwon), ▲Eunyoung Lee (Director, Evaluation Study Division, Ministry of Science and ICT), ▲ Yoon-jong Jang (President, POSCO Research Institute), and ▲Sun-hwa Hahn (Director, Policy Office, National Research Council of Science and Technology (Former President of KISTI)).
 
 
 

▲ Panel discussion

 

▲ Photo from the colloquium