Maryna Horokhovatska , Vasylieva Nadiia , Oleksandra Pravdyva , Harashchenko Nataliia , Oleksandr Skorokhod
Ukraine’s research and innovation activities are in danger.
Negative processes in science had intensified way before the full-scale war began, including a reduction in the number of researchers and the share of research and development funding in GDP, a decrease in the weight of scientific expertise in political decision-making, and many others. This led, among other things, to a decline in scientific potential indicators, including human capital, commercialisation of developments, and cooperation among scientists, businesses, and the government. The full-scale war, which has been ongoing for over a year and a half, is worsening the situation.
During the war, society has been widely debating the effectiveness of the research and innovation system (RIS) and the approaches to its management. The role of science and innovation is being reassessed and their importance as social phenomena for postwar recovery is being emphasised.
Domestic legislation currently does not utilise the term “research and innovation system”; however, it is becoming increasingly prevalent in practice in the context of inseparability of science and innovation as social phenomena and the systemic relationship highlighted in EU documents.
European documents do not have a single established definition of the concept of “research and innovation system”. However, the phrase “science [or research] and innovation” is used to refer to both the system and the policies implemented by the state, “the environment in which partnership participation takes place”; “a system of networks and collaboration that foster efficiency in the society and provide a stable environment for research”; and a system that carries out “excellent science and generates new knowledge, transforms fundamental scientific knowledge into concrete solutions, by funding and performing excellent fundamental and targeted research”.
The RIS components include government authorities that formulate and implement science and innovation policy, universities, research institutions, investment funds and donor organisations that fund science, as well as researchers, citizens, politicians, businesses, and third sector organisations that cooperate with each other throughout the entire process of research and innovation.
Thus, it can be said that the research and innovation system is a system of interconnected organisations and institutions involved in the processes of conducting scientific research and development and creating innovations, their organisational and financial support, as well as in the implementation of R&D results and promotion of innovations in the real economy.
For more than 30 years since gaining independence, the Ukrainian RIS has experienced stagnation. On the one hand, after the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine still had hundreds of scientific institutions and design bureaus employing more than 300,000 scientists who demonstrated highlevel results in many fields, and on the other hand, broken production process chains, the economic crisis of the 1990s, lack of attention from the state, further loss of personnel and infrastructure obsolescence — all this led to the gradual degradation of the RIS and its fragmentation.
Today, Ukraine finds itself in a unique situation where the existing challenges and threats can turn into incentives for the rapid restoration of its research and innovation potential, which in turn will become a key element to significantly accelerate the country’s postwar reconstruction. However, this is not an automatic process but rather an opportunity that should be seized. The restoration of Ukraine’s RIS requires a strategic vision, the development and implementation of a well-thought-out set of policies, mutual coordination among many stakeholders and actors, and the attraction of sufficient funding.
The aim of this paper is to substantiate the directions of RIS transformation for the restoration of Ukrainian science and Ukraine.
To this end, the authors have carried out the following activities during their study:
1. definition of the role of the RIS in overcoming the challenges of post-war recovery;
2. analysis of the institutional conditions for the RIS functioning and key problems identification;
3. preparation of recommendations for the transformation of the RIS for post-war recovery.
RIS is a complex system that brings together various institutions and actors involved in scientific, scientific, technical, and innovation activities, as well as the infrastructure that supports their functioning. The war in Ukraine had a negative impact on all its levels and elements, exhibiting multiple manifestations of this destructive influence, including physical, financial, demographic, emotional and psychological. The recommendations for overcoming these consequences, presented in this and other papers of the Science at Risk! project, can be applied universally to restore the RIS in different countries that may suffer from armed conflicts, wars, man-made or natural disasters. These recommendations include ways to involve the scientific community in post-war recovery processes, establish communication between RIS actors and the environment (such as the state, business, and society), and expand the range of funding mechanisms for research, development, and innovation.