UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT

UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT
the volume of high-tech exports remains well below the level
of Viet Nam or the Philippines. The same goes for internet
access. Although investment in tertiary education has risen
since 2007 and Indonesia has no lack of university graduates,
enrolment in science remains comparatively low.
Moves to develop industrial research
Much of Indonesia’s scientific capacity is concentrated in
public research institutions, which employed one in four
(27%) researchers by head count in 2009, according to the
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Nine institutions come under
the umbrella of the Ministry of Research and a further 18
under other ministries. The majority of researchers (55% by
head count) are employed by the country’s 400 universities,
however, four of which figure in the top 1 000, according to
the World Ranking Web of Universities. Researchers publish
mainly in life sciences (41%) and geosciences (16%), according
to the Web of Science (Figure 27.8). The publication rate has
grown since 2010 but at a slower pace than for Southeast Asia
overall. Almost nine out of ten articles (86%) have at least one
international co-author.
One-third of researchers were employed by industry in 2009,
including state-owned enterprises (Figure 27.7). A World
Bank loan was announced in 2013 to ‘strengthen the bridge’
between research and development goals by helping research
centres to ‘define their strategic priorities and upgrade their
human resources to match these priorities’ (World Bank, 2014).
The big challenge will be to nurture the private sector and
encourage S&T personnel to migrate towards it.
The government has put incentive schemes in place to
strengthen the linkages between R&D institutes, universities
and firms but these focus primarily on the public sector supply
side. The co-ordination of research activities by different
players may be influenced by the National Research Council
(Dewan Riset Nasional) chaired by the Ministry of Research
and Technology, which groups representatives of ten other
ministries and has reported to the president since 1999.
However, the National Research Council has a modest budget,
equivalent to less than 1% that of the Indonesian Institute
of Sciences (Oey-Gardiner and Sejahtera, 2011). Moreover,
although it continues to advise the Ministry of Research and
Technology, it also advises the Regional Research Councils
(Dewan Riset Daerah) that have assumed greater significance
through the Indonesian decentralization process.
Indonesia’s innovation effort is weak on two counts. In
addition to the very modest role played by the private
sector, the GERD/GDP ratio is negligible: 0.08% in 2009. In
2012, as part of the Master Plan to 2025’s key strategy for
‘strengthening human resource capacity and national science
and technology,’ the Ministry for Research and Technology
released a plan to foster innovation in six economic corridors;
this plan still places emphasis primarily on the public sector,
despite the government’s desire to transfer S&T capacity
to industrial enterprises. The plan aims to decentralize
innovation policy by establishing regional priorities, which
nevertheless remain focused on resource-based industries:
n Sumatra: steel, shipping, palm oil and coal;
n Java: food and beverages, textiles, transport equipment,
shipping, ICTs and defence;
n Kalimantan: steel, bauxite, palm oil, coal, oil, gas and timber;
n Sulawesi: nickel, food and agriculture (including cocoa),
oil, gas and fisheries;
n Bali – Nussa Tengarra (Lesser Sunda Islands): tourism,
animal husbandry and fisheries; and
n Papua – Maluku Islands: nickel, copper, agriculture, oil
and gas and fisheries.
The predicted additional economic activity in these six
corridors has already inspired a policy recommendation
for over US$ 300 million to be directed towards new
infrastructure development, to improve power generation and
transportation. The government has committed 10% of this
amount, the remainder having been provided by state-owned
enterprises, the private sector and through public–private
partnerships.
Since taking office, the Joko Widodo government has
been focusing on fiscal reform to improve the business
environment. His government has not changed the general
direction of S&T policies and thus still plans to transfer part
of public investment in R&D to the business sector. Recent
regulations have sought to increase the level of value-added
production in sectors such as the mobile phone industry.
A new initiative intended to promote development at
the value-added end of the market is a proposal in the
2015 budget to establish a body which would oversee the
development of creative industries such as fashion and
design. The overall national structure for managing science
policy and public sector investment in science remains
largely unchanged.
The multi-donor Programme for Eastern Indonesia SME
Assistance (PENSA) is currently being evaluated. PENSA was
launched in 2003 with the general objective of expanding
opportunities for SMEs in Eastern Indonesia. More recently,
the emphasis has shifted towards enhancing the financial
capacity of SMEs and reforming the business environment.
Consequently, by the time PENSA 2 was launched in 2008,
it had become a five-year technical assistance programme
with a focus on training commercial bank employees
in outreach services and improving the regulatory
environment and corporate governance among firms in
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