과학기술혁신의 투입과 성과 지표

This research succeeds the mutli-year project on the indicators of science, technology. The overall scheme of the project is to provide a comprehensive system of indicators, in terms of both objects and subjects. The objects comprise innovation actors and bibliographic information. As for actors, the project aims to cover firms, universities, and government laboratories. Bibliographic information is of two kinds: articles and patents. Subjects of indicators are also systemic because they range from inputs for innovation such as research and development to outcomes of innovation such as knowledge or economic impacts. Since the coverage of actors is too broad to deal with in one year, except for firms, the project selects other actors(universities or government laboratories) alternatively each year. The last year’s research covered firms and universities and the next year’s one will cover firms and government laboratories. And this years’s research starts to study bibliographic information: more narrowly academic articles. The next year’s one will study patent bibliographic information. Thus, in summary, this year’s indicator research studies on firms and academic articles. This year’s frame of Indicator study on firms is the same as the last year’s. It is made of three parts responding to: respectively (1) meso-level aggregate indicators for firms, (2) composite innovation indicators for individual company, (3) high growth firms. However, except for the first part(the first part is annually updated), richer study is made. This year, a survey of expert’s qualitative evaluation of firm’s innovation is made and so a qualitative indicator of firm’s innovation is constructed. The composite indicator combining the qualitative and quantitative kind is able to a more comprehensive understanding of firm’s innovation. For innovation, qualitative per se, is hard to comprehend from quantitative indicators. And as the study on high growth firms accumulates over four years (including this year), further inter-temporal comparative analysis is made and the result of analysis gets more robust. The bibliographic study of academic articles focuses on the interdisciplinarity of life science, considering the systemic feature of life science absorbing all the knowledge and technologies. To understand that, Korea is compared with the US in both time points: 2000 and 2010. The US is chosen because of its leading role in both interdisciplinarity and life science. The two time points are chosen to reveal the rapid diffusion of interdisciplinarity. Major findings and implications of the research on firms are as follows. (1) While small and medium firms are shows innovative efforts, they are very vulnerable to business cycle; hurt severly in downturn but slow to benefit from upturn. (2) Firms of size between 300~1,000 employees continue to expand its position as innovators thanks to the entry of past-smaller innovative firms to this category. This is surely welcomed as a good sign in the Korean economy since this range of firms is regarded as a week backbone in ecology of firms. (3) This year sees the trembling of the electronics sector which is most innovative and the driver of the Korean economy. While the upstream sectors such as chemicals and machines improves its innovative capability, they are yet much behind from the electronic sector. We need to watch out for the industrial dimension of innovation. (4) Regional disparity in innovation is obvious, continuing to reveal a huge gap between capital Seoul and its vicinity provinces. One comforting fact is that Chung-cheong South and North provinces, around the geographical center of Korea, shows their enhancing capability in innovation. (5) RD but not in synchronization. The qualitative evaluation gives upper hands to the sector such as chemicals and IT(not the hardware based kind) whose innovation is less valued at the quantitative indicators. This seems to be due to the size bias which tends to overestimate large firms. (7) Innovative firms tend to be successful in economic terms as well. However there are firms that do no appear in innovation from indicators of innovation but do well in economic performance. The firms are usually veterans of long history and keep up very well to shop-floor competitiveness. This also highlights that competitiveness of firms does not always have to be achieved by the formal efforts such as R&D.