Abstract
Government R&D investments are steadily increasing with the perception that R&D plays an important role in technological innovation and sustainable economic growth. In particular, because biotechnology is recognized as one of the next growth engines, the Korean government has recently increased their investment in biotechnology R&D. However, careful analysis of the efficiency of government-sponsored R&D projects is still lacking. In this paper, we measured the technical efficiency and technology gap ratio to investigate the efficiency of Korean government-sponsored R&D projects of 16 sub-biotechnologies from 2007 to 2013 using a metafrontier Data Envelopment Analysis approach. There was no improvement in overall efficiency between 2007 and 2013. Biochip development technology has been the most efficient sub-biotechnology field and the least efficient fields have been biotechnology product safety and efficacy assessment technology. Medical science and engineering is the closest to optimal production technology among sub-biotechnologies. The efficiency of universities and government-funded research institutes is high, while the efficiency of companies is relatively low. The results suggest that the government should improve the R&D planning process and establish a customized R&D investment strategy that considers the characteristics of technologies and the seven organization types of R&D conductors to increase R&D efficiency.
Highlights
Government investment in R&D is an important factor in technological innovation
We investigated the efficiency of Korean government-sponsored biotechnology R&D projects between 2007 and 2013 using a metafrontier Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach
We estimated the technical efficiency of Korean government-sponsored biotechnology R&D projects between 2007 and 2013 under the group frontier and metafrontier
Summary
Government investment in R&D is an important factor in technological innovation. Implementing a technology innovation strategy to accelerate R&D has become one of the government’s most important industrial policies. The Korean government has continuously increased its R&D investment. The quantitative growth of R&D investment and the socioeconomic impact and efficiency of R&D activities are attracting great attention. If it is difficult to increase the investment quantitatively because of realistic reasons, such as resource constraints, further efforts to improve R&D efficiency are required. Understanding the nature of the efficiency of R&D is important for the establishment of policies to improve resource allocation [8]. The Korean government considers biotechnology to be one of the growth engines and has been increasing its investment in recent years. The efficiency of government-funded R&D is becoming increasingly important in Korea
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