Business Enterprise Sector and Other institutions

 

The industrial research institutes, engineering departments and special engineering bureaus are associated with specific economic areas and focus on industrial R&D. According to Yegorov (2013)¹¹¹

 

107 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

108 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

109 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

110 http://www.increast.eu/en/194.php: accessed on 2 May 2016.

 

these organisations are formally subordinated to the different ministries and state agencies but in recent years ties with the ministries have weakened. It is worth to mention that the boundaries between the

 

state and private R&D organisations in Ukraine are ‘blurred’ and a number of ‘mixed ownership’

 

organisations exists, which are owned partly by the state and, partially, by the employees. These organisations receive a fraction of their financing from the state in form of block grants, giving the ministries the right to be involved in the nomination of their directors. The share of direct financing from

 

the ministries is usually not higher than 25% of an organisation’s total budget. The rest of the financing

 

is contracted both from state-owned and private companies. Many Ukrainian companies, however, prefer to purchase technologies from abroad, as foreign partners could provide more effective solutions and better services.¹¹²

 

Systematic business R&D beyond the operations of the industrial research institutes, engineering departments and special engineering bureaus, is either hardly present in Ukraine or statistically insufficiently recorded. The demand for R&D results and innovation from the side of domestic companies dropped substantially since the independence of the country. This is also evidenced by the fact that the share of Ukraine’s high and medium tech sectors shrunk threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, while at the same time the shares of the energy and ferrous metallurgy sectors grew substantially.¹¹³ These low value added sectors have a more stable and mature technological base, which does not require a lot of R&D, but are less innovative than high and medium tech sectors that contributed to the overall decline of the number of innovative enterprises. According to Yegorov (2013) even the remaining enterprises of the machine-building sector (for example shipbuilding) occupy very often the lowest segments in the world markets, not mentioning ferrous metallurgy and production of basic chemicals. Competition in such markets is particularly fierce and Ukrainian companies are persistently under pressure to lose their existing positions to firms from developing countries.¹¹⁴

 

QUALITY OF THE SCIENCE BASE

 

6.1. R&D Infrastructure

 

As a heritage from the Soviet Union, Ukraine accommodated nearly 20% of the experimental facilities of the USSR including nuclear reactors, astronomic observatories, and ships for marine research, but a substantial part of this infrastructure has been lost during independence.

 

Today, the research infrastructure facilities for Ukrainian researchers are overall outdated, since financial resources to renew research equipment have been very low. Together with the low salaries paid to Ukrainian researchers, this bad situation of the research facilities is considered a major driver for brain drain. According to Yegorov (2013) the “problem developed over many years and has now reached such proportions that neither quick nor inexpensive solutions are feasible”.¹¹⁵

 

Ukraine still has a few R&D infrastructures in operation which are, although insufficiently funded, internationally recognised. Most of these are located at different institutes of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Up-to-date, 15 Ukrainian research entities are included in the European Research Infrastructure Observatory. These are

 

· A.O. Kovalevskiy Institute of Biology of Southern Seas, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· Association of users of Ukrainian Research and Academic Network URAN

 

· Danube Hydrometeorological Observatory of State Hydrometeorological Service of Ministry of Ukraine of Emergencies and Affairs of Population Protection from Consequences of Chernobyl Catastrophe

 

· G.V.Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

 

111 The entire paragraph is taken from Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

112 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

113 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

114 Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine.

 

¹¹⁵ Yegorov, I. (2013): ERAWATCH Country Reports 2012: Ukraine, p. 27.

 

· Institute of Geological Sciences, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· Innovation Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· State Museum of Natural History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· Ukrainian Lingua-Information Fund, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· Odessa National I.I. Mechnikov University

 

· Southern Scientific Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography

 

· Taurida National V.I. Vernadsky University

 

· Marine Hydrophysical Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

 

· Ukrainian Scientific and Research Institute of Ecological Problems

 

· Ukrainian Scientific Centre of Ecology of the Sea

 

· Ukrainian Scientific Research Hydrometeorological Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine – marine branch

 

The coordination and cooperation between Ukrainian and European Research Infrastructures in any of these fields is reluctant beyond specifically funded projects, of which many are supported by the 7^th European Framework Programmes for RTD and HORIZON 2020.