Hyun-Dae CHO - Senior Research Fellow Science and Technology Policy Institute of Korea

This paper aims to review the features of Korean public (science and technology) research system and analyzethe issues and discussions about it. Furthermore, it attempts to draw and present implications to other developingcountries from the Korean experience. Public research system of Korea consists mainly of universities,government-supported research institutes (GRIs), and other national and public research institutes (hereafterPRIs). The universities include research-oriented universities that pursue knowledge creation, generaluniversities that focus on the application and diffusion of the knowledge, and technical colleges that concentrateon training skills required in industry. The main interest of many researches on Korean universities has beencentered around research-oriented and general universities. These have examined on the issues such as (1)government’s research funding mechanism for promoting university research, (2) expertise and roles ofsupporting organizations and personnel of universities for increasing research productivity, (3)commercialization of university research outcomes, (4) promotion of university - industry collaboration anduniversity - public research institutes collaboration, and (5) benchmarking the university research system ofadvanced countries such as US for the advancement of Korean university research system. Research anddiscussions about GRIs have focused on the issues such as (1) the governance of 25 GRIs (now under theNational Research Council of Science & Technology), (2) Korean government’s funding methods for GRIs(including research budget, researchers and labor expenses, administrative expenses, etc.), (3) promotingcommercialization of GRIs research outcomes, (4) institutional management of GRIs such as management oforganization and human resources, and evaluation method of institutes and individual researcher, (5)benchmarking the research system of national/public institutes of advanced countries such as US for upgradingKorean GRI system. PRIs have not been studied and discussed much as they are receive less funding from thegovernment than GRIs and then their research projects scale are not bigger than GRIs . PRIs have attractedless attention than GRIs for these reasons. The features of Korean public research system and the issuesregarding it as explained above may provide many implications to other developing countries. These issues ofKorea may be the future as well as current issues of other developing countries. Therefore, understanding theKorean experience about these issues and discussions for overcoming problems involved these issues maycontribute to the advancement of their public research systems for other developing countries.

Korea, Research System, University, GRIs, Issues and Implications