Science as a project – Newspaper Kommersant No. 160 (7122) from 09/07/2021

by time news

As it became known to Kommersant, the new state program of scientific and technological development (STD) of the Russian Federation will focus on supporting the creation of end products and technologies. To do this, it is planned to link it with the priorities of the scientific and technological revolution strategy, including “rejuvenating” the composition of researchers, increasing the participation of business in financing research and focusing efforts on promising areas, including medicine, agribusiness and energy. State program worth more than 1 trillion rubles. consolidates budgetary spending on science, and its final results should become the seventh place in the world in terms of development and the transformation of the Russian Federation into a net exporter of technologies and technological services.

The state program “Scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation” will immediately be formed on the basis of new, primarily project-based approaches, the Ministry of Education and Science told Kommersant. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko announced the start of work on the document at the end of August (see Kommersant on August 26).

The cost of the new state program will be more than 1 trillion rubles. by combining all scientific expenditures of the budget and can be increased due to new initiatives for the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation, which have been prepared by the government.

The emphasis on supporting the creation of final products and technologies will be ensured “through the implementation of a set of measures on four institutional priorities – leadership and research frontiers, personnel and human capital, interaction and cooperation, infrastructure and environment – and seven subject priorities of the NTR strategy: new technologies, energy, medicine, agro-industrial complex, security, space development, social and humanitarian challenges, ”the department told Kommersant.

The goal that the Ministry of Education and Science lays in the new state program is to achieve the seventh place in the world ranking in terms of research and development by 2030.

For this, internal expenditures on research and development should reach 1.64% of GDP, and the ratio of the volume of private and budget financing should rise to 75%. Note that in recent years, according to UNESCO, scientific expenditures of the Russian Federation have decreased to 0.99% of GDP from 1.07% in 2014 (on the contrary, the world average indicator, on the contrary, grew – from 1.73% in 2014 to 1.79% in 2018). Experts from the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) of the Higher School of Economics estimated the indicator for 2019 at a comparable RUB 1.13 trillion, or 1.03% of GDP. The main source of R&D funding was the state (66.3% versus 70.3% in 2010), but the share of companies’ investments (against the background of a decrease in total expenditures) increased from 25.5% to 30.2%.

However, announcing the program, Dmitry Chernyshenko noted that the big threat for its implementation is not underfunding, but “the inertia of the scientific community”. According to him, it is necessary to rethink and reboot the approach precisely in the conduct of the scientific projects themselves. This is probably why one of the targets set by the ministry in the document is the increase in the share of young specialists (up to 39 years old) to 50%.

In practical terms, the project “reset” of the state program should lead to the fact that by 2030, Russia’s exports of technologies and services of a technological nature will exceed their imports by 15%.

So far, according to ISSEK, the proportion is reversed – the volume of Russian exports and imports of technologies exceeded $ 4.5 billion and $ 4.8 billion in 2020, but the country’s participation in such trade over the past 20 years has grown 20 times – its total turnover in 2020 hit an all-time high of $ 9.4 billion

The Ministry of Education and Science also noted that the formation of the federal budget and passports of the state program, its structural elements are now being completed. At the end of August, the head of the department, Valery Falkov, announced that the state program is planned to be discussed in September with the business community. In October, a new state program is expected to be presented at the Presidential Council for Science.

Venera Petrova

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