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New blood needed for sci-tech industries: NSC

The science and technology industry needs to be injected with new blood and innovation, or else Taiwan risks economic decline, National Science Council (NSC) officials said at a press conference yesterday.

“Though the high technology industry has contributed tremendously to Taiwan’s prosperity, there is strong evidence that incremental improvement within the current industrial base would not be enough to sustain healthy economical growth,” said Foresight Taiwan project leader Eugene Wong (王佑曾), a Academia Sinica academician.

Citing Nobel economics laureate Robert Fogel’s predictions, Wong said that many strong economies in the world, including Japan and the EU, might face decline by 2040.

“Taiwan currently sits on the threshold of being a wealthy country; the question is, where will Taiwan be in 2040?” Wong said.

To maintain its current world ranking, Taiwan would need annual economical growth of 4 percent for the next 30 or so years, Wong said, however, “this would not be easy.”

In fact, though the high-tech industry boomed in the 1980s, contrary to many people’s perceptions, Taiwan’s growth rate peaked in 1980 and has been in decline ever since, he said.

Science and technology are still the key to reviving the economy, he said.

However, new components in industry need to be employed and this would be the aim of the Foresight project, he said.

“Taiwan’s high-tech industry has been an ‘adaptive’ economy instead of an ‘innovative’ one — our societal role models are owners of big businesses, however, their success was not built upon inventing new things,” he said.

“The US, for example, will remain the world leader in 2040 [Fogel said] mainly because of two reasons: its strong and diverse demographics [due to its open immigration policy], and also, no country in the world is more innovative than the US; its societal heroes are innovators such as Edison and Einstein,” Wong said.

Though Taiwan has unfavorable demographics, it can find its own competitive edge by creating new technologies and applying them to end products, Wong said.

“It is also extremely important to improve our service-sector — 70 percent of the nation’s GDP depends on the service industry, however, though Taiwan has a highly educated workforce, many service jobs are poor utilizations of our human resource capital,” he said.

As such, the project last year sponsored eight programs, six of which were early-stage technology research and development programs, one was a high value-added service program [medical tourism], and one aimed to scope emerging technologies, he said.

This year, the program will expand its NT$60 million (US$2 million) annual budget to about NT$100 million to host three new ideas: germination of startups, energy storage technology development and risk management programs, Wong said.

“The current world financial crisis stems from a failure in management of risks — however, it also presents special windows of opportunity for new economies like Taiwan,” he said.

“Science and technology are already important to the nation’s economy, but their roles can be further enhanced in major ways,” he said.
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