AGGRESSIVE R&D AGENDA WILL SPUR ECONOMIC GROWTH -- ANGARA

Senator Edgardo J. Angara today called for the promotion of a sound policy environment for transferring and commercialization of government-funded research and development (R&D) results to ensure positive gains on our national economy.

"As the world shifts into a more knowledge-based economy, we need an aggressive R&D agenda fully-funded by both public and private sectors. In fact, other countries have already set up innovation systems, which became the nucleus of their policy for economic growth. Yet, our country still lags behind well-developed economies because we lack creative technology transfer capability," said Angara, who also chairs the Senate Committee on Science and Technology.

"It has been said that strong productivity growth has been recorded in the United States, Japan and other European countries as their technological innovations sprung from high-quality research institutions. Brazil, for an instance, has also modernized its National Innovation System through a strong public R&D and industry linkage. In this fast emerging innovation economy, our country must indeed innovate or perish," he added.

The Philippines has yet to achieve high level of technological readiness and innovative capacity that typify well-developed economies.

According to the 2007-2008 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, the Philippines ranks 71st out of the 131 countries in terms of technological readiness or ability to adopt technology from home or abroad to enhance the productivity of its industries. This is in contrast with the high rankings of our Asian neighbors like Singapore (7th), Japan (8th), Korea (11th), HongKong (12th), Malaysia (21th) and Thailand (28 th).

To remedy the situation, Senator Angara sponsored the Technology Transfer Act of 2007, which aims to create a support system for an effective use, management and commercialization of intellectual property resulting from government-funded R&D with the needs of the government to disseminate, diffuse and transfer economically relevant knowledge and technologies.

Under the proposed measure, ownership of intellectual property (IP) generated from government-funded research shall be vested on the research development institute (RDI). However, the government funding agencies shall be allowed to use the IP for government purposes. In addition, public RDIs shall have the authority to use the income derived from commercialization of IPs.