Issue Policy aversion to pairing advanced science with regional innovation

Summary

Korean science and technology policy has long emphasized excellence, meaning the best knowledge, competitiveness and talent, in pursuit of new growth engines. Since the rapid-growth era this has been bound up with the notion that the center does basic research while regions do industrial technology, which hardened into common-sense practice. Given the capacity gaps, non-capital regions ranked fourth to seventeenth can hardly catch up with Seoul, Gyeonggi and Daejeon through isolated strategies of their own. The author concludes that regional science and technology has clear limits in winning social consent as a path to national innovation growth. In that context, attaching the word advanced, which implies excellence and leadership, to regional science and technology naturally provokes policy resistance. The article sets out to challenge this assumption with historical cases and current regional plans.