STI policy for sustainable growth: A Korean experience

摘要

What would be a new vision of science, technology and innovation (STI) policy? Many countries have set economic development as the highest priority, such as GDP, GNI. Economic development is still important but now on STI policy needs a vision with more integrated perspective. This paper proposes “sustainable growth” as a new vision of STI policy. Sustainable growth includes economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability. Science and technology play a critical role to implement sustainable growth. In particular, there are increasing interest and demand for resolving emerging issues such as environment issues, aging issues, and polarization issues. Actually, many leading countries are trying to get sustainable growth and resolve social challenges based on science and technology. Korea is also expanding its science and technology investment to environmental sustainability and social sustainability, which has been mainly focused to economic sustainability. Since 2014, Korean government has implemented independent R&D program to meet the demand for social issues, as a multi-ministerial program. Lessons and implications will be introduced from the experience of this program. This paper concludes with recognizing need for transition to new STI system that has characteristics of openness, balance, and holistic view.