In 2014 the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) launched a Creative Productivity Index (CPI) as a new way of rating a country’s innovation capacity.
The CPI looks specifically into how efficiently a country is able to convert its investments in its knowledge and skills base into “creative outputs,” like patents granted and studies published.
Out of 24 mostly Asian economies surveyed in the report, the Philippines ranked a dismal 18th, measuring only a low-to-medium capacity for “creative productivity,” hence a limited ability to ensure long-term, sustainable economic growth.
Among the factors dragging our score down were a rigid labor market; continuous brain drain, where nearly a million semiskilled and skilled workers leave to work abroad each year; and a scientific enterprise system unable to provide the country’s best and brightest financial and social incentives to do science and technology academic degrees and remain working in the field.
In 2011 there were only 165 research and development personnel for every million Filipinos, way below the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco)-recommended 380 for every million for economic development. In a March 2016 white paper, the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) estimated that we need to graduate at least 3,000 new PhDs each year for the next 10 years “to meet Unesco’s critical threshold comparable to the more technologically advanced or progressive countries in the region.”
Last week Dr. Caesar Saloma delivered the last of this year’s UP President Edgardo J. Angara Professional Lectures. He said that, while graduate enrollment in all fields increased by 67 percent between 2003 and 2015, the number of faculty members with PhD degrees grew by only 3.3 percent. He noted that up to 99 percent of all the higher-education institutions in the country are currently incapable of offering PhD programs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics on account of a lack of qualified faculty.
This has been a perennial problem, rooted in our historical underinvestment in science and technology, as well as in research and development. But promoting innovation is not simply a matter of throwing money at the problem. More important, it’s a matter of laying down the right policies and enticing incentives.
For instance, a paper cited that cumbersome public procurement processes are at the root of why public research in the Philippines has hardly taken off and why very few of our talented youth pursue advanced careers in science.
What we need is an entire ecosystem that supports innovation and creativity—including world-class academic programs, close university-industry linkages and responsive government policy.
Among the key players in the creativity game—the academia, industry, philanthropy and government—government should play the proactive conductor in knowledge-based value creation. But ours is largely indifferent.
The 10-point Duterte socioeconomic agenda highlights the promotion of “science, technology and the creative arts, to enhance innovation and creative capacity towards self-sustaining, inclusive development.” In the next six years, we hope to see our government taking the leading role in the creativity game.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.