S.Korea to fully open gov't R&D projects to foreign researchers

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on Wednesday said it will allocate 5 trillion won ($3.8 billion) of its R&D budget for excellent foreign researchers including those with Korean ancestry.

"We will abolish the threshold so that foreign scholars and researchers can receive international joint R&D funding from the ministry," First Vice Minister Jang Young-jin told a news conference in the Silicon Valley region of Palo Alto, California.

International joint R&D is a government-sponsored program for domestic companies and think tanks to jointly develop technologies with foreign researchers.

About 300 billion won of the ministry's R&D budget of 5 trillion won this year is allocated for international joint R&D, with foreign researchers getting 10% or 30 billion won. The ministry will drastically revamp the system, which was run in a closed manner, to allow research institutions abroad with excellent planned projects to directly implement them.

The ministry will also directly issue patents to such researchers after government R&D is carried out.

"Inter-country competition in advanced technologies is intensifying," the vice minister said. "Along with large-scale technological innovation that transcends a single country, participation of researchers with advanced technological development capabilities is more pressing than ever."

The official on Tuesday visited Silicon Valley to attend the ROK (Republic of Korea)-USA Industrial Technology R&D Forum at the Palo Alto Event Center, an event that attracted Nvidia, Google, NASA, Stanford University and MIT.

The ministry this month will also begin exploring R&D demand for domestic companies and foreign researchers and aggressively start joint R&D with the US from early next year.

Write to Jin-Suk Choi at iskra@hankyung.com