Research and Development Investment and Collaboration Framework for the Hydrogen Economy in South Korea

Abstract

South Korea developed its hydrogen strategies to achieve carbon neutrality and dominate the hydrogen economy amidst, and with the impetus, of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The government strives toward the goal via continuous investment in green hydrogen technologies, as well as strategic collaborations. To facilitate the transition into the hydrogen economy, this study presents a research and development (R&D) investment and collaboration framework as a national strategy. The framework offers abundant information to elucidate the technology, R&D spectrum, and regional dimensions of the strategy. Furthermore, the proposed framework was applied to the Korean hydrogen economy comprising 955 nationally funded projects worth USD 565.7 million. The statuses and trends of the government’s investment in nationally funded research projects are illustrated with regard to the value chains of the hydrogen economies of 16 regions, as well as nine technology clusters relating to the hydrogen economy, thereby determining the research organizations that played crucial roles in each cluster of the 16 regions between 2015 and 2020. The results indicate that the research organizations in Daejeon acquired the highest government R&D funding in many hydrogen-economy-related research fields, and that an R&D spectrum-based research/strategic collaboration is required to accomplish specialized complexes in the regions.

A Delphi method on the positive impact of COVID-19 on higher education institutions: Perceptions of academics from Malaysia

“…This could be due to the shortage of research grants by the government and the industry. However, research and development activities at HEIs should continue despite the many barriers and obstacles ( Sohrabi et al, 2021 ) by exploring collaboration with other local and abroad entities ( Lee and Kim, 2021 ).…”

Public R&D Projects-Based Investment and Collaboration Framework for an Overarching South Korean National Strategy of Personalized Medicine

“…First, we presented an investment and collaboration framework that provides information on the status and trends of government R&D investments in the technology sector in the target area. Based on previous studies [27,28], data on national research projects, project period, and funding were used. Thus, this information enables the PM's R&D managers to form strategic collaborations while considering the limited resources, lack of knowledge, and uncertainty about the market in the early PM industry.…”

“…To establish the framework for the national strategy of PM, it is necessary to identify a basis for the segments of the target research domain and investigate each to discuss the direction of future research from the perspective of government funding and collaboration. As suggested by prior studies [27,28,51], this procedure can become the foundation that clarifies the different statuses and research organizations of target fields, thereby improving the quality of decision making for the national R&D planning strategy. As a result, this study provides useful information about detailed R&D activities such as title, scale of funding, research organizations' name, region, and project manager of target fields.…”

“…To identify the characteristics of these nationally funded R&D projects, we used the All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) model developed through machine learning employing author keywords from approximately 10,000 recent articles in each ASJC field (e.g., 1311: Genetics, 1312: Molecular Biology) in the Scopus database as the feature and the 344 field names of the ASJC codes used to classify journals in Scopus as the labels [27,28]. Three ASJC codes (labels) were attached to each public R&D project, and the probability of relevance of each assigned ASJC code was indicated based on information (feature) from the title and abstract of the R&D project.…”

“…Thus, it is necessary for scientists and experts to provide salient, credible, and legitimate information stemming from a systematic framework for investment and collaborative research strategies of PM, thereby avoiding the potentially biasing influence in decision making [23][24][25][26]. To complement the lack of such framework studies to implement strategies, we adopted our framework [27,28], which could present the information about the current status of and future directions for the overarching South Korean national research and development (R&D) strategy of PM.…”