Ukraine is struggling to take advantage of its Soviet scientific heritage.
Ukraine is struggling to take advantage of its Soviet scientific heritage and halt the decline of its research and innovation industries. One of the problems is that businesses remain reluctant to fill the void of government funds that have all but dried up.
The country’s older generation of scientists report difficulties in commercializing their more promising inventions in the face of dwindling state support and lukewarm responses from the business sector. Meanwhile, science students readily admit that low salaries and dim employment prospects make the profession unattractive for many.
“Unfortunately, our country still prefers any kind of raw material and the low-tech industry,” said Mikhail Zgurovsky, rector of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, referring to the country’s reliance on steel exports. “In terms of large-scale engineering education, we have a growing gap between the global level and the level in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s slide imperils the country’s economic potential in an age when economists see business-driven research and development as key.
While Ukraine boasts links to six Nobel Prize winners and has a bevy of world-famous engineers, today’s top scientists who lived and worked in the Soviet era are quick to point out the source of today’s ills –insufficient government investment and weak private support.
“Under the old system, scientists innovated products and government institutes helped to produce them,” said Pavlo Tsybulov, a science professor and member of Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, who authored a 2010 report on barriers to commercializing research in Ukraine.
“Since the market economy [was introduced], the government has stopped funding these kinds of innovation enablers.”
Ukraine’s slide imperils the country’s economic potential in an age when economists see business-driven research and development as key.
Volodmyr Sosnytskyy, head of Magnetocardiography Research Laboratory at the Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, leads a team that makes the magnetocardiograph, a non-invasive, early detection system for heart disease.
“The government can only support us by words,” said Sosnytskyy.
His system has been labeled “the future of cardiology,” by Viktor Korsun, deputy executive director of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine, which helps to promote the research of Ukrainian scientists.
The United Nations Scientific, Education and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 2010 Science Report reveals that Ukraine’s total private and public expenditures on research and development as a percentage of gross domestic product fell from 0.96 percent in 2000 to 0.85 percent in 2008, putting Ukraine behind the U.S. (2.72 percent), Russia (1.12 percent) and Belarus (0.96 percent).
A report published this year by the World Economic Forum ranks Ukraine 89th out of 139 countries in global competitiveness, a measure based on the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country.
This score represents a drop of seven places from the previous year.
When it comes to capacity for innovation, Ukraine fell by five places from 32nd to 37th. In fact, in one year Ukraine regressed on every measure of innovation but one.
“There’s no cooperation among companies,” said Ukrainian-American businessman George Logush, vice president of leading poultry producer MHP. “Science could help industry and industry could help science. But that’s not happening. And that’s a shame because Ukraine is losing its edge.”
Despite interest from European and Chinese businesses, Sosnytskyy said Ukrainian entrepreneurs have been less enthusiastic about his medical system. “They are only interested in very short-term projects,” he said.
Hope may be found in the prospect of Ukraine’s richest citizens paying more attention to the new generation of scientists.
In May, Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk said he considered attracting private sector investment into education as a priority for his ministry.
Some of Ukraine’s biggest companies have in recent years begun supporting universities.
Ferrexpo ore mining company, majority-owned by parliamentarian and billionaire Kostyantyn Zhevago, “has a range of business-education programs, including the allocation of about Hr 5 million each year to vocational, grant and scholarship projects and the employment of some graduates of the Mining Lyceum of Komsomolsk,” said company spokesman Maxim Prasolov.
Zhevago’s ship-building company, Zaliv Shipyard, also works with the National University of Shipbuilding in Mykolayiv and its students, Prasolov said.
Kyiv Polytechnic Institute reports recently having signed memorandums on strategic cooperation with companies owned by billionaires Rinat Akhmetov and Dmytro Firtash.
“We try to establish direct links with companies to organize jobs for our students,” said KPI’s Zgurovsky.
While this is proving possible in engineering fields, he said that students in other fields of science such as chemistry and biology have a more difficult employment challenge.
Some of Ukraine’s biggest companies have in recent years begun supporting universities.
The World Economic Forum writes that Ukraine’s “competitive strengths in the past years [remain] a well-educated population, flexible and efficient labor markets, and a large market size continue.”
The World Economic Forum considers Ukraine’s math and science education to be a comparative advantage.
Yet the working conditions and the popular image of scientists means that Ukrainian science students continue to be a courageous bunch.
Alexei Orlov, soon to begin a masters in computer science at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, said that “the image of scientists is not pretty” in Ukraine today. It’s not difficult to see why.
According to the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, senior scientists earn on average $600 per month and doctoral students researching at Ukrainian institutes earn as little as $200 per month.
Dmytro Demerskyi, a recent doctoral graduate in material science, works at the Institute for Problems in Material Science on microwave processing of ceramics and metals.
He admits that a scientist has to be primarily motivated by science, not money.
“It’s not the salary you get from the state you rely on. You get research grants and get more money from other sources,” Demerskyi said.
And while his path to employment was relatively straight forward, only two out of 40 students he knows have found work in fields related to their science studies.
Kyiv Post staff writer Will Fitzgibbon can be reached at [email protected].
