Towards an R&d Strategy for Israel

The proposed reduction in and recent negotiations, discussions and lobbying concerning the R&D budget of the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) at the Ministry of Industry and Trade highlight the importance of approaching the question of government policy in support of R&D not only in a more systematic and analytic fashion than has been the case up to now in Israel but also through adoption of a radical new perspective. It must have been clear for some time, and certainly is clear starting this year, that keeping the pace of past government disbursements in support of business sector R&D (see Table 1[a, b] and Figure 1[a,b]) is not going to happened without a fundamental restructuring of policy. In the past the rate of growth of government disbursements to such R&D largely depended on the ‘demand’ for R&D embedded in projects submitted to the OCS — the rates of support (risk-sharing through conditional loans) to R&D remained, until recently, more or less fixed. This in turn, was presumably linked to the rate of growth of high-tech industry in general. In the past year (and probably more so in the future) there has been a reduction in the ‘universality’ of R&D support flowing from the main R&D support program of the OCS as well as some deviations from neutrality in incentives. So far this has not led to ‘sector/technology selectivity’ but rather to differences in