“The Atlas of Ideas: How Asian innovation can benefit us all” es un proyecto de Demos, un influyente Think Tank independiente inglés que ha estudiado durante tres años el estado de la ciencia y la innovación en tres mercados emergentes: India, Corea y China. El resultado es un informe que está disponible para la descarga y que analiza en detalle el estado de la innovación en esos tres países. Hay informes detallados, de los que se pueden destacar los dedicados a China, “China: The next science superpower?“, y Corea, “Korea: Mass innovation comes of age“.
Además de los informes generados, en la web de Demos es posible encontrar las transparencias que se hicieron durante el evento de presentación. Aunque en muchos casos con una orientación hacia el Reino Unido y sus condicionantes, en muchas de ellas es posible encontrar contenidos muy interesantes, especialmente teniendo en cuenta que buena parte de los ponentes eran personas con responsabilidades directas en la I+D de los tres países.
Entre los muchos contenidos interesantes de la web, sólo una pincelada, tres grandes tendencias en la I+D mundial de acuerdo con la consultora Deloitte:
- Increased collaboration in R&D worldwide
- Growing realiance on off-shoring of R&D activities
- Expanded interconnections at sub-national level in specific specializations as part of formation of transnational R&D networks: less and less meaning to the concept of “national” innovation system
Por último, un breve introducción al informe y su contenido:
We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.
All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.
This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.
Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia’s share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.
These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.
Alongside new sources of competition, the rise of China, India and South Korea creates new opportunities for collaboration. We need to develop better mechanisms for orchestrating research across international networks, and for directing innovation towards shared goals of development and environmental sustainability.
El trabajo continuará en los próximos tres años, extendiendo el foco a otras economías emergentes y más cercanas a nosotros, como Brasil.
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