South Korea: model for developing countries in science, innovation
By Dr. Muhammad Nauman
South Korea was an agrarian-based Japanese colony in the first half of the 20th century, and then a war ground. The country is ranked 11th in the separate 2019 Global Innovation Ranking, published by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Germany is ranked ninth among the 129 countries.
In Bloomberg's 2020 Innovation Index, Korea is second only to Germany, which has reigned at the top of the 60-country chart for the last five years.
All these numbers demonstrate that the country, once considered as having poor policies regarding science and technology, has created ripples across the globe thanks to its exceptional development and performance in the field of science and technology.
The Korean government is budgeting a considerable amount of money into the R&D sector. The country has the largest share of researchers moving from industry to academia from 2017 to 2019 among 71 countries, according to data from an academic recruitment agency, League of Scholars.
The economy has been transformed from its postwar reliance on technology imports and development of industrial facilities by foreign firms to domestic labor-intensive industries. These moves helped in the cultivation of strong industrial groups called chaebol.
The famous companies LG, Lotte, Samsung, etc. were chaebol at that time. These chaebol, or conglomerates, were directed toward the heavy industries, automobiles, petrochemicals, constructions firms, consumer electronics as well as shipbuilding.
It has been reported that South Korea adopted a “top-down” innovation system that helped the country become a global leader in information and communication. There has been close collaboration and communication among the government, industry and academia.
Such a strong trio acts as a multidimensional tuning knob that keeps alive innovation in the industrial sector, trains professors from the academic sector via conferences, workshops, findings and mutual cooperation. The strong communication between industry and academia helps in reducing the financial load on the government.
On one side, academia executes the R&D tasks for industry whereas on the other hand industry provides funding and projects to academia and helps in reducing the budget allocation load on the government.
Samsung has a strong partnership with 10 Korean universities and it has published around 159 research papers in nature between 2015 and 2019 along with Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU).
The collaboration is particularly important in electrochemistry and new energy resources. The private R&D spending by chaebol was about 80 percent of the overall R&D investment in South Korea in 2019, ahead of leading innovative nations such as Germany, Sweden and Switzerland.
The systematic approach taken by the South Korean government has been the crucial factor in creating an innovative economy capable of turning ideas from labs into products and industries. Some experts call this development a miracle by looking at the country's situation back in the 1970s and 80s.
South Korea is a perfect model for developing countries to excel in a short span of time in science and exploration.
Park Heui-jae, a professor at Seoul National University, stressed the dire need for collaboration and cooperation in order to make effective use of technology, saying that technology alone is of no use if national coordination and international cooperation are lacking.
The writer (nouman.kakakhail@gmail.com) is a researcher at Kyungpook National University in South Korea and former vice president of the Pakistani Students and Scholars Association Korea (PSAK).