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Science: Research for the Real Sector
Vlast analytical weekly continues its examination of various aspects of Russian life and how they have changed in the last eight years. Here, rector of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys Dmitry Livanov discusses Russian science in that period.
Russian science has experienced paradoxical development in the 2000s. The country retains its high scientific potential and is spending more and more on science and innovation. But the technical backwardness of the Russian economy increases every year. There are two causes of this paradox. First, the colossal state sector in the sciences, inherited from the USSR, is highly dependent on the federal budget and weakly connected with industry. Second, there are few stimuli to innovation in the corporate sector of the economy so far. It is clear that diversification and large scale technical updating will be impossible in the Russia economy until the traditional inefficiency that is the curse of Soviet-Russian science is overcome.
Recent tendencies are discomfiting. Russia is becoming less noticeable on the world market for the products of fundamental research, and the situation is unlikely to improve as long as the Soviet system of management and financing is maintained. The tremendous growth in funding in the Russian sciences has been accompanied by a decrease in publication by scientists, a decline in personnel potential and a lowering of Russia's position as a scientific power. Meanwhile, the domestic economy is turning the country into a net importer of technology. That is mainly due to the inability of Russian research and development to offer competitive technology ready to use and take responsibility for its industrial implementation. Therefore, although Russian business has a low level of innovative activity and the demand for R&D is low so far, even that demand is being met by Russian scientific organizations by only about half.
One of the main indicators of the innovativeness of the economy is gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD). That indicator has been growing in Russia in recent years, but that has been driven by budget expenditure. Two negative tendencies are continuing. First, GERD is growing more slowly than the hydrocarbon-powered economy is growing as a whole and so the share of science in the economy is shrinking. Second, R&D expenditures in the corporate sector are shrinking (in constant prices).
It is clear what needs to be done. Experts have long been in agreement on a remedial program. Conceptual documents were written in 2000 and 2006. The first was “A Basis for Policy on the Development of Science and Technology,” and the other was “A Strategy for Development of Science and Innovation.” They laid out the basic problems in the development of science and innovation and measures to solve them and the resources needed to do so. In short, two related tasks have to be completed. The first is reorient science toward results and create a competitive atmosphere. The second is to guarantee the integrity of the innovation system, that is, to create elements of the innovative infrastructure that were missing earlier, mainly finance mechanisms, and stimulate the development of ties between participants in innovative processes – scientific organizations, institutions of higher education and industry. Those measures are still far from fully implemented.
Fundamental science in Russia, unfortunately, is still in decline. Instead of trying to preserve a core of competent researchers in the 1990s, the managers of academic science were concerned with extending the privileges of their status (the number of academics and directors of scientific agencies has doubled since Soviet times) and finding commercial uses for the property complex inherited from Soviet times. One is forced to agree with those scientists who say that fundamental science as a national institution simply does not exist today in Russia. Statistics on the public activities of Russian scientists from 1998 to 2006 show that, even with tremendous increases in expenditures, in the absence of a system of powerful scientific foundations, indicators have shown no improvement.
Moreover, further increases in funding, without simultaneous institutional and structural reforms, may not only be ineffective, but may even lead to negative results. High salaries without a dynamic personnel policy will not encourage a renew of personnel, but the prolongation of a critical situation, the maintenance of those researchers whose qualifications have long been lost and who will be unable to work productively no matter what salary is given, although they will hold on to their administrative influence. Increasing expenditures on scientific equipment without a grant system will unavoidably lead to the expensive equipment being distributed not to scientists working at the modern level, but to distribution based on the usual principle of status.
The lack of progress is due not only to resistance from the academic establishment, which is trying to preserve the existing order. That order was called “sclerotic” in a recent issue of Nature. When it became clear that raising the productivity of research entailed stricter requirements, movement toward financing based on results and the replacement of the management of weak institutes, the lack of responsibility and qualified management became apparent. The present personnel policy of the state scientific academies is aimed at preserving scientific feudalism and artificially limiting the influx of younger personnel into management positions. Therefore, the shortage of modern managers in the sciences, people capable of setting ambitious goals, ready to take responsibility for the quality of their work and become centers of consolidation for the competent part of the scientific community. Scientific teams have become accustomed to working without any demands from the government or economy in the last 15 years, with very few exceptions. They say that the quality of fundamental science and its productivity cannot be measured. But they have been measuring that quality for a very long time in the countries that lead in that research and in Russia as well, in individual institutions, the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences, for example, an evaluation system for scientific productiveness is in place.
The lack of authoritative, modern managers is largely responsible for the failure of dialog between the scientific community and the officials responsible for reforming it. The professional scientific community has every reason to oppose quality requirements set by people who are not competent in scientific subjects. But calls for the scientists themselves to formulate an evaluation system for their work that will inspire general confidence have gone unheeded. The academic community has not made coherent proposals (or maybe they were blocked) and there has been practically no dialog.
There has been some success in the second of the main areas of scientific reform, the establishment of a modern innovative infrastructure. New institutions of development have been created – the Investment Fund, special economic zones, the Development Bank, the Russian Venture Co., the Russian Nanotechnology Corp. (Rosnanotekh). It should be noted that not one of those has become fully functional yet though. The tax climate has become better for innovative activities. Since the fourth part of the Civil Code has come into force, a legal basis for a civilized market for intellectual activities has been created.
The reaction of the economy to those measures has been extremely modest so far. Statistics show that innovative activity in industry and companies' expenditures on technological innovation have grown in recent years, although slowly. At the same time, the increasing demand for innovation seen in several branches of industry is being through the import of technology and equipment. Thus, there is a reserve available for the expansion of domestic research and development now. Meeting that demand will be possible only when the quality of domestic development of the production-ready equipment needed by industry has been improved. Improved quality on the development market is exactly what is not being seen in Russia. No serious attention is being given to the creation of a nongovernmental research and development sector. “Corporate science” exists in a small number of sectors, while state scientific organizations have pulled farther away from the real economy in recent years, eating away at Soviet technical reserves and absorbing ever more budget financing. Part f the problem is that federal target programs intended for technological development do not create the conditions for real private-state partnership in their implementation and budget funds are being directed not toward the creation of competitive technology that there is a demand for, but toward financing the routine activities of state scientific organizations. As a result, those organizations lose the stimulus to work with business, and the gap between the quality of the supply offered by Russian science and the demand for ready technology experience by industry is only widening.
There is one more important obstacle to innovative development. That is that even the really important measures being implemented by the state in this area are being implemented without coordination. So far is has not been possible to use the institutions of development that have been founded in a coordinated manner or for the state to coordinate their activities effectively when it uses them. Moreover, in spite of efforts to create a real arena for interaction between the state and business in the area of innovation, that work is far from complete.
Since companies' main stimulus to innovation is high market competition, it is necessary not only set up effective private-state partnerships and improve the tax climate, but to develop competition and eliminate artificially protected enterprises from the market, in order to raise the effectiveness of innovative activities in Russian enterprises. In this context, there is a well-understood risk in the creation of large state companies in the high-technology sphere, except for those cases when such companies are included in global technological competition.
It would be nice to think that, after the 2007-2008 election cycle, the radical reforms that this area is ripe for will be started. Although the reforms could be carried out in a number of ways, its goals are clear. Structurally, it is to transfer the center of fundamental research to the best Russian universities by associating academic and industrial research institutes to them. Financially, it is the mass conversion to the financing of fundamental research based on projects rather than status through a system of science funds with strong, independent experts. The only path to recovery is professional outside quality control and personnel, financial and property management in academic institutes for several years. The return to normal reasoning will be long and painful. To overcome Russia's increasing backwardness in innovation development in comparison with developed and many developing countries, the transition must be made from stimulating supply from budget-funded scientific organizations on the R&D market to stimulating demand from business. Both traditional measures, such as tax incentives and encouragement of competition and such things as government co-financing of companies' research and development costs should be used. In other words, only the developments of those organizations that do high-quality research on order from the real sector of the economy should be financed from the state budget.
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Science: A Chronology
2002 Passage of the “Basics of the Policy of the Russian Federation in the Area of Development of Science and Technology until 2010.” Among other things, the following tasks were defined: raising the demand for innovation, adapting the scientific and technical complex to market conditions and strengthening science in institutions of higher education.
2005 Approval of the “Program for the Modernization of the Science Sector.” In particular, it proposed to increase salaries for science workers to 30,000 rubles per month by 2008 while decreasing positions by 10 percent.
2006 Creation of the Russian Venture Co. to finance innovative companies by acting through private venture funds. In the first half of 2007, it was proposed to invest 5 billion rubles through the company. A system of indicators for the results of scientific activity was introduced. That system is applied to every science worker and considers the quantity and quality of publications, patents, leadership positions, and so on. Employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences receive bonuses based on the system.
2007 Amendments to the law “On Science” come into force under which the charter of the Russian Academy of Sciences is approved by the government and the president of the Academy is approved by the head of state. The Russian Nanotechnology Corp. (Rosnanotekh) is formed and 130 billion rubles is allotted for research in that area, not counting about 50 billion rubles already budgeted under federal target programs.
“Science without Demand Is a Heavy Burden on the Budget”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began his presidential career demanding money for science from private investors, and is ending it by providing additional tens of billions of rubles for science from the federal budget.
2000 “even those scanty funds that were allotted [in the 1990s]… hardly made it to the sciences. Today, the situation is completely different. But the innovative activity of the country's economy, unfortunately, is very low”
2001 “The state should be the purchaser for research and development only in proportion to its real economic possibilities.”
2004 “Solutions to the problem of young people in science and personnel problems are, unfortunately, fragmentary and nonsystemic so far… Most of all, we still don't have a modern, effective model of the economics of science yet.”
2006 “Even with the desire for innovation, business in our country has nowhere to go with its money now… And the tax system still doesn't stimulate production with high added value. Benefits for R&D are practically absent.”
2007 “Modernization of the Russian economy is impossible without bolstering domestic science… In 2008, it is proposed to spend 48 billion rubles on a fundamental research program. In addition, 8 billion rubles will be invested in funds to support fundamental research… Special target programs are another area of financing, as part of which state orders for applied scientific research and development will be awarded by open competition.”
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 26, 2007
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