By Yuan Dongming & Cheng Yu, DRC

2017-03-06

In the context of the current innovation-driven development, the demand of industries and enterprises for applied research is increasing in the course of industrial transformation and upgrading, whereas current applied research is lagging behind, which has become a weak link of China’s technical innovation drive. Reconstructing applied public research system has become a strong demand for China’s enterprises’ innovation-driven development.

The reasons why industries and enterprises have such an urgent demand for applied public research are as follows: 1. After the economic development entered the state of new normal, some key technical issues have become bottlenecks restricting China’s industrial transformation and upgrading to advance to the mid-to-high-ends of the industrial chain and that requires endogenous technical innovations to resolve these issues. 2. The technical forces of most enterprises in China are too weak to undertake the tasks to conduct applied research by themselves.

The inadequacy of current applied public research has become the weak link of China’s technical innovation chain, which are mainly manifested in these facts. 1. The research capacity of broadly applicable technology of professional applied public research institutes has been weakened after they are reorganized into enterprises. 2. Applied public research institutes are formed through cooperation between the academy of sciences and local institutes, and these applied public research institutes are constrained by scientific research management system, resulting in inadequate incentive measures, inflexible institutional mechanism and incompatible coordination between different levels. 3. The new type of applied research institutes with commercialized operation has not been included into the management of public system.

Following are suggestions on reconstructing China’s applied public research system. 1. Plans should be made across the board with local institutes playing the main and dynamic role. 2. We need to tap the potential of existing resources and make good use of additional resources with multi-pronged approaches. 3. We need to make innovations in the institutional mechanism of applied research institutes. 4. We need to cultivate an innovative ecological system focused on applied research institutes. 5. The government needs to provide effective support to the development of applied research institutes of various kinds.