national system of innovation in slovenia - Mednarodni odnosi

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National system of innovation in Slovenia
Figure 4.3.1: Students (ISCED 5-6) studying in another EU-27, EEA or Candidate
country – as % of all students
3,5
3
2,5
2
1,5
2000
2007
1
0,5
0
EU27
Source: Eurostat (2010).
United
Kingdom
Hungary Slovenia CzechR. Finland
Currently prevailing funding system for higher education separates the educational
funding (which follows the number of students enrolled, the number of
staff employed and the number of programmes), from the research one. When
it comes to research, HEIs are treated as any other public research unit and apply
for research funds through public calls for research programmes/projects at
Slovenian Research Agency, so one could say competitive funding prevails. The
HEIs can also raise support for the research activity from business sector. Due to
relative independence of the research units (often called institutes) it is difficult
to clearly establish the amount of financing coming to HEI from different sectors.
The national statistics show that in 2008 the R&D at HEI sector comes mainly
from the government (76.4 %), from abroad (11.3 %), the business sector (10.0 %)
and HEI sector itself (2 %). HEI performs 13.4 % of total R&D in Slovenia or, in
amount of 0.22 % of GDP (SORS 2009).
HEI employed in 2008 41 % of all Slovenian researchers according to head
count; or 25 % if only full time equivalent (FTE) is taken into account. The current
employment regulations allow regular teaching staff with 100 % pedagogical
assignment to participate on top of these 100 % in the amount of 20 % of FTE in
publicly funded research, so most of the university professors would be counted
as 20 % of FTE – which explains the difference in head count from the FTE.
One of the characteristics of the research at the universities is very small research
groups. It is quite customary that each department/chair is involved in research
around the topic of own interest, but some faculties/universities have their
own research institutes as well. For example, Faculty of Economics at the University
of Ljubljana has its own Research centre with 137 researchers, most of them
being involved also in teaching (but not all of them); many similar specialised
research centres exist in faculties in the fields of natural sciences and medicine.