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State Innovation in Science: new five-year plan, some old problem
The 2011 financial crisis was accompanied by an unprecedented reduction in science budgets. The era of primarily state#financed scientific research is now drawing to a close, thus putting the issue of finding mechanisms to commercialise science onto the agenda. This is in line with recently#emerging trends in science#funding policy, and corresponds to the strategic benchmarks of the State Innovation Development Program (SIDP) for 2011–2015, which was adopted in May 2011.The SIDP 2011–2015 sets practical goals for introducing innovationin legislative, institutional, financial, human resources, and infrastructural reform fields. The unrushed implementation of these reforms during the previous five#year period (SIDP 2007–2010) was replaced by convulsive and radical reform attitudes in late 2011 when, against the backdrop of the financial crisis, the critically low level of science funding began to become painfully obvious. The initial year of SIDP 2011–2015 was quite productive in terms of legislative improvements in the fields of science, technology and innovation. But the results from implementing innovation projects were less impressive, due to a number of major infrastructural, staffing, and financial challenges.