Socio-Economic and Developmental Needs - Focus of Foresight Programmes

Emerging economies in the CEE/NIS region – faced with a number of similar or same challenges when trying to find their new role in the changing international settings, while still characterised by their own distinct level of socio-economic development, set of institutions, culture and norms – can benefit significantly from conducting foresight programmes. Yet, foresight should not be conducted for its own sake – just because it is becoming “fashionable” throughout the world, and currently being promoted by the EU. On the contrary, there should be a strong link between foresight, decision preparation and policy-making. In other words, foresight should be used in the context of (adequately identified) policy needs. Its focus (e.g. purely technological, technoeconomic or broad socio-economic orientation) is, therefore, largely determined by the perceived socio-economic and developmental needs. Further, its focus, broad objectives, geographical scope (level), themes, time horizon, methods and participation are closely interrelated, and thus a careful – but flexible – project design is needed to assure coherence among these constituents. It should be borne in mind, however, that foresight is only one of the available policy instruments, and definitely not a panacea.

Does Innovation Policy Matter in a Transition Country? – The case of Hungary

The political and economic transition posed a complex, tremendous challenge in Hungary in the beginning of the 1990s. Not only macroeconomic stabilisation was required, but fundamental organisational and institutional changes were also needed to transform the country into a stable, middle-income economy, capable of catching up with the more advanced ones in the longer run. Having completed the first round of transition, Hungary has again reached a cross-roads. While the oneparty system has been replaced with a multi-party parliamentary democracy and the planned economy with a market economy based on private ownership, the world has significantly changed during this historically short period of time. Hungary now has to consider what role to play in the globalising learning economy, i.e. what future it envisions for herself. To be more specific, does the country passively accept the fate of a mere surviving economy, drifting without having its own strategy? Or, by implementing a clear strategy, does Hungary intend to be prosperous country, where in 15-20 years most citizens will enjoy high living standards, good health and a clean environment? The paper argues that a sound, coherent innovation policy is one of the cornerstones of an overall development strategy, required if a country is to excel. Yet, in spite of a number of efforts/ trials in the 1990s, no such policy document was approved in Hungary. The article first provides a brief overview of the transition process, emphasising the simultaneous need for systemic (institutional) changes and macroeconomic stabilisation in order to improve (micro)economic performance. Its core section analyses recent changes in the S&T decision- making system, various efforts to draft S&T and innovation policy documents, as well as the inputs and outputs of R&D and innovation. It concludes that the lack of an explicit innovation policy may hinder longterm development as such a policy is required to signal the main policy directions and commitments of the government, to strengthen the national inovation system – thus anchor FDI – and to align all public and private efforts, resources for development.

A new problem in string searching

We describe a substring search problem that arises in group presentation simplification processes. We suggest a two-level searching model: skip and match levels. We give two timestamp algorithms which skip searching parts of the text where there are no matches at all and prove their correctness. At the match level, we consider Harrison signature, Karp-Rabin fingerprint, Bloom filter and automata based matching algorithms and present experimental performance figures.Comment: To appear in Proceedings Fifth Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC'94), Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

The Socio-economic Impacts of Framework Programmes in Transition Countries - A systemic Approach of Assessment Methods

This paper assesses the socio-economic impacts stemming from Research,Technological Development and Demonstration Framework Programmes (FPs) project participation in a transition economy. Some of the most significant impacts of Central and Eastern European participation in FPs can only be understood in the context of the changing national innovation systems (NIS). In other words, when assessing impacts, besides the ‘usual’ questions on product and process development, job creation, etc., a broader set of questions should be asked, concerning competences: managerial, project development, network and collaboration-building capabilities, i.e. the process, and elements, of organisational learning, broadly defined. Our main methodological argument is based on two underlying characteristics of the Hungarian NIS. First, it had been fragmented during the planned economy the academy-industry relations had been rather weak. Second, due to the overall socio-economic transition it is also in flux, some former links have been further damaged, while new players have appeared and new, stronger incentives have been put in place to form new partnerships. Behavioural and organisational ‘effects’ of FP participation are likely to be crucial – besides the ‘usual’ outputs and impacts. Our main policy conclusion is that it would well worth the effort to apply – a broader framework for impacts and effects to a larger, statistically representative sample. Thus a reliable description could be obtained, on which basis sound policy conclusions could also be drawn.

Various approaches to measuring business innovation

This paper reviews various approaches to measuring business innovation from the angle of capturing social innovations and offers several methodological and policy conclusions. First , the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) indicators in principle could be useful in settings where the dominant mode of innovation is based on R&D activities. In practice, however, both R&D and non-R&D-based modes of innovation are fairly important. IUS, therefore, only provides a partial picture. Social innovations can certainly rely on R&D-based technological innovations. Their essence, however, tends to be organisational, managerial and behavioural changes. The IUS indicators do not capture these types of changes. Second , an assessment of the 81 indicators used to compile the Global Innovation Index reveals that it would neither be a fruitful effort to rely on those indicators to capture social innovations. Third , given the diversity among innovation systems, a poor performance signalled by a composite indicator does not automatically identify the area(s) necessitating the most urgent policy actions. Only tailored, thorough comparative analyses can do so. Fourth , analysts and policy-makers need to be aware of the differences between measuring (i) social innovation activities (efforts) themselves, (ii) the framework conditions (pre-requisites, available inputs, skills, norms, values, behavioural patterns, etc.) of being socially innovative, and (iii) the economic, societal or environmental impacts of social innovations

Types of knowledge and diversity of business-academia collaborations. Implications for measurement and policy

Business-academia (B-A) collaborations have been analysed by an extensive body of literature, taking many different angles, and using various sources and types of information (patent statistics, the Community Innovation Survey data, evidence from specific surveys, interviews, or case studies), but usually a given paper is relying on a single method, addressing one or two major research questions. In contrast, this paper tackles both R&D and innovation collaborations among businesses and academia relying on information from different statistics and interviews. The latter source also allows exploring motivations for, and major features of, business-academia co-operation. The paper argues that mapping B-A collaborations by using multiple methods and multiple sources of information can significantly improve the reliability and richness of our understanding, and can offer insights on dynamics and qualitative features of these co-operation processes. Interviews conducted in Hungary – in line with other research findings – have also confirmed that (i) motivations, incentives for, and norms of, conducting R&D and innovation activities diametrically differ in business and academia; and (ii) different types of firms have different needs. Thus, more refined policy measures are to be devised to promote B-A collaboration more efficiently, better tuned to the needs of the actors, based on a relevant taxonomy of their co-operations. Evaluation criteria for academics should also be revised to remove some major obstacles, currently blocking more effective B-A co-operation. Several findings presented in this paper can be generalised beyond the cases considered, but the research design to analyse B-A collaborations and the concomitant policy recommendations always need to be tailored to the innovation systems in question

Objective conjugation and medialisation

This paper is concerned with the origins and the function of the objective verbal conjugation especially in Hungarian but with an eye to general typology and Uralic. Previous attempts at solving problems associated with it are given a critical survey. The author argues that since objective conjugation is neither specific to Hungarian nor to its relatives, whether close or distant, but is found in various language families and language types all over the world, one should seek explanations in universal tendencies rather than giving ad hoc accounts. The universal tendency of medialisation is pointed out here-especially in the first and second persons of the paradigm-, which differentiated what is now called the (unmarked) general or indefinite conjugation from the original unitary conjugation. It is here proposed that what now functions as the objective conjugation results historically from a reinterpretation of the original paradigm as in contrast with the medial (then general) paradigm. This explains the curious fact that although the objective paradigm is now seen as the new marked member of the opposition, it is this paradigm that preserves the personal endings going back to the ancestral pronouns. The author also argues that the emergence of an objective conjugation in those Uralic languages that have one represents independent developments, though the preconditions for its evolution may have been there in Proto-Uralic in the form of object syntagms