No market formula
By : Anna KociNska
Two years ago, Kazimierz Brudzewski, a physicist and professor in the chemistry department at Warsaw's Technical University, built a "nos elektroniczny," an electronic nose used to detect and classify odors.
The nose, which contains chemical sensors and a pattern recognition system, reacts to the chemical compounds in tested substances to provide an image of a given aroma. According to Brudzewski, there are no other aroma detectors of this kind in Poland and only a few industrial centers in the world where such equipment is being produced. But on his home turf, the professor has failed to find a single business interested in the electronic proboscis.
"The problem is that the electronic nose is not the only thing I'm working on," he said. "As a university professor, I have 210 hours of didactics per year to perform. And it would take a full-time business manager to promote the nose in the economic community."
Brudzewski said he was trying to attract the attention of Browary Warszawskie Krolewskie, a Warsaw-based brewery where a handful of his former students were interns. He said he would like to convince the company that his device could guarantee a uniform final product for the brewer. The electronic nose, according to Brudzewski, could work as a completely objective beer "taster," detecting aromas and classifying them according to database patterns logged in all stages of beer production. The nose could detect, among others things, a concentration of diacetyl, a chemical that decides a beer's aroma. According to beer producers, the smaller the concentration of diacetyl, the better the beer tastes. "If we enter the beer market it would put us in a totally different situation," he said.
Polish businesses, however, are not tripping over each other to buy licenses for devices like Brudzewski's. "That's because there's not enough capital on the Polish market," he said. "If medium companies had the money, they would surely get involved in these kinds of innovations."
At the moment, only companies with foreign capital can afford to routinely upgrade their production processes, Polish scientists said. "And they don't need Polish research institutes because they import new technology rather than create it here," Brudzewski said. "Last year, when Coca-Cola had problems with fungus in bottles, the company's Polish subsidiary imported a U.S.-made electronic nose (for testing bottles before filling) for $150,000." Brudzewski's electronic nose could cost as little as $20,000 by comparison. "It's a pity nobody approached us. We are able, at any moment, to build equipment that would answer the needs of not only the food industry, but also the cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies," he said.
The government, headed by Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, a chemistry professor himself, seems to understand that further economic development is limited without homespun creators of new technology. "A lack of innovation in Polish industry is one of the main barriers to increasing dynamic development," according to a report on Poland's long-term development strategy accepted by the Cabinet Economic Committee (KERM) June 26. The report also stated that the structure of domestic industry is outmoded. Those employed in the high-tech industry, which tends to be the driving force behind many other economies, account for 15% of Poland's employed compared with 28-30% in the European Union. Therefore, the report said, the current account deficit stems to a large degree from Poland's low number of hi-tech and internationally competitive exports. In 1997 such products accounted for 2% of Poland's exports as compared with 27.4% in Ireland and 11.3% in Germany. At the same time, domestic production is increasingly being replaced by imports. Industrial goods accounted for 44% of all imports in 1998, estimated the report. And for every seven production licenses bought by businesses in Poland, only one comes from a domestic research center.
Blunted promise
Andrzej Wiszniewski, the science minister and chairman of the State Research Committee (KBN), said that low demand for Polish innovations is caused, among other reasons, by structural and ownership changes in the economy. "Companies sold to foreign strategic investors rely on imported solutions, and those that haven't been sold yet focus not on innovating their production but finding an investor," he said.
But according to critics of the present system, a communist holdover, it's not just this country's economic transition that should be blamed for the lack of reciprocity between the scientific and economic sectors. Critics said that there was no serious supply of scientific solutions applicable for industry. "The majority of research institutes don't create anything apart from tons of publications," said Bronislaw Pura, head of the non-linear optics laboratory in the physics department at Warsaw Technical University. "Which country in the world can afford to finance 300 state research institutes that function in almost complete isolation from the needs of industry?"
Polish science wasn't always behind the rest of the world. Before World War II, scientists from the Lwow and Warsaw Technical Universities belonged to the world's most creative group of scientists. In 1927, when world aviation was just being born, Rogalski, Drzewiecki and Wigura, three talented students from the mechanics department of Warsaw Technical University, built the RWD-1 airplane, the first in a series of world-renowned RWD tourist machines. In those days students did not ask anyone for money, but paid for the test flights themselves while working long hours on their designs in the university's basement.
Footing the bill
Today, 220 research centers and 80 scientific units of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) are funded from the state budget. "And society is not spending that money on concrete scientific solutions," Pura said. "According to a Japanese report on world science, Poland is the biggest spender of research not applicable to production."
In accordance with estimates from the Central Statistical Office (GUS), only 11.4% of research conducted at 220 Polish institutes accounts for so-called applied research. At PAN's scientific units, 86.3% of its research is classified as "basic" and not applicable to economics. "I've also heard about PAN's scientific units, where publications are prepared by temporarily employed Ukrainian or Russian scientists in the absence of Polish scientists who work in Western institutes," Pura said. "They (research institutes) were established under communism for purely propagandist reasons, not because industry needed them all."
Pura, who is also an adviser to the state Agency for Technology (ATiT), said that the activities of many institutes have nothing to do with research since they often lease their buildings to companies or establish private schools. "In Western countries it's business and not the state that establishes research centers and employs the best people for specific jobs," he said.
In Poland, 63.5-88.3% of financing for both research institutes and PAN's scientific units comes from the state budget, according to a 1997 GUS estimate. In Western countries only 30% of financing is state provided.
Most research institutes live on grants from the State Research Committee (KBN), a governmental body set up by Parliament in 1991. The KBN is the authority on science and technology policy. But its main goal is to distribute state funds for scientific research. This year its budget of zl. 3.5 billion ($800 million) will be divided among research institutes, PAN's scientific units and higher education institutions.
"KBN? I would call it a center for giving away public money," Pura said. "Too often scientific projects co-financed by KBN end up not implemented in industry and the money is spent on conferences and meetings. Projects are only designed on paper."
Every year, KBN doles out cash to about 10,000 scientific projects. On average, the committee assigns grants for a three-year period. "Only 40% of applications eventually get financing," said Tadeusz Zaleski, KBN's spokesman. "Thank God KBN has few funds because any amount of money would be wasted," Pura said.
Rewarding performance
According to a group of scientists affiliated with the ATiT, Polish science needs radical changes if it's ever going to compete with fast moving Western technology. "Our industry is drastically retarded and only hi-tech production can have a serious impact on this country's development," Pura said. "It's not agriculture or mining that will decide the well-being of this country. Without high technology there will be no innovations in other sectors of the economy." According to Pura, it's time for all the existing research institutes to prove they can actually create something. "Credits that they will have to pay back, not grants, should be the only way to support them," he said. "Demand for scientific services will decide which centers will survive. What's more, KBN's financing should be directed mainly for high technology (projects)."
While the science minister, Wiszniewski, said he was not satisfied with the work of research institutes, he took a cautious approach to changing the system. "We are in the process of privatizing the economy but research institutes are still state-owned and are not related with industry, that's true," he said. "But I'm not a revolutionary and I think that as a rule revolution is not good for science and scientists, who are conservatives."
Wiszniewski said he planned to use economic incentives to bring out necessary reform. "I will grant financial help to successful institutes and I will deny money to mediocre centers," he said.
He added that the KBN was already implementing a merit-based strategy, with some institutes getting just 80% of their previous year's financing due to the poor quality of their work. "At the same time, the best centers were rewarded and will get even 130% of what they were assigned last year," Zaleski said. According to Wiszniewski there is no other way to change the system under which Polish science has functioned for the last 55 years. "Revolution could have been made in 1990, today, it's not possible any more," he said. "Besides, we're talking about thousands (more than 30,000) of people employed in those centers, it's a serious human factor when it comes to decisions," he said.
Nevertheless, Wiszniewski plans to abolish 30% of the existing research centers. Some 20 institutes, such as the Meteorology Institute, will be state-owned. "And PAN's scientific units, which conduct basic research, should become more involved in the education process," he said.
Understaffed and underpaid
"We need to attract bright, young people who will be able to create new technologies," Pura said. "The communist system already proved that it's not possible to develop science by decree."
But it's almost a rule these days that young scientists wind up in the private sector because universities and research centers are vastly underpaid. Warsaw Technical University's physics department has employed just three young people during the last 10 years. "When I started my studies I wasn't looking at anything else but physics, my passion. But times have changed," Brudzewski said. These days, a young scientist with a doctorate brave enough to stay at a university can make zl. 1,500 a month. A professor doesn't earn more than zl. 3,500, according to GUS estimates. At the same time, a young equity analyst with an MBA or a physicist who works for an IT company can make zl. 10,000 monthly. "No wonder the average age of academic teachers is now 65 years," Pura said. A lot of Polish students get international scholarships and internships where they can learn how to use the most modern technological devices. "The problem is that when they come back they cannot use their experience because Polish universities cannot afford to purchase modern equipment," Pura said. Most universities in Poland have to make do with obsolete technology. Pura's faculty, for instance, has a yearly budget of zl. 800,000. A spectrometer, a must in an optics lab, costs $100,000. According to Pura and Brudzewski, some scientists have already given up on direct research and turned to computer simulations. "We are laughing that instead of practicing engineers we now have engineer simulators," Pura said.
Cause for optimism
The solution to the country's underfunded science and research lies in the private sector rather than more public money, but the objectives of business and scientific research have to be matched. KBN has already taken some modest steps to share the costs of research with private companies. Last year, zl. 204 million ($52 million), 7.5% of last year's budget, was spent on so-called goal-oriented projects (projekty celowe). Requested by various companies, the projects' costs were split with the KBN. As a rule, businesses have to cover at least 35% of a project's costs. KBN signed 2,168 such contracts in the last seven years. But if Polish scientists are to successfully compete with their Western counterparts, they need more funding than that.
"We need a strong economic impulse. Once companies understand that investing in science pays off, everything will get moving," Brudzewski said.
To date, that impulse comes almost exclusively from companies with foreign capital, which are setting up research centers and sponsoring specific projects around the country. Motorola Polska, a telecom equipment manufacturer, plans to invest $18 million in a software center to be constructed in Krakow's special economic zone. Motorola also opened a temporary center on property leased from Jagiellonian University, which employs 100 highly qualified IT specialists. The number of staff is expected to increase to 500 once the new center is built. "Completely new projects are created in the center," said Richard Lada, Motorola's country manager. "Due to the intellectual capacity of Polish engineers, it's better to develop new projects here. Not everybody wants to go to the States these days, Poland has changed a lot."
Some universities are also not waiting for the government to draft a development strategy for Polish science. Instead, they're doing it themselves. Jagiellonian University plans to develop a hi-tech campus by cooperating with Motorola, among others. In 1995, the Adam Mickiewicz Foundation established a Poznan Science and Technology Park. "We're making money with a yearly turnover exceeding zl. 10 million ($2.27 million) and nobody is subsidizing us," said Jacek Gulinski, a chemistry professor and deputy director of the park. Its 3.2 hectares are home to various research centers, such as an archeological research unit and a chemical synthesis lab. Archeologists will have a lab for radiocarbon dating. "We have regular contacts with local businesses (Amica Wronki, CCM Poznan) and do research for them," Gulinski said. "At the same time we are slowly renovating some premises for a modern lab. And that will be the place for real high technology that can be sold for real money." For scientists like Gulinski, the times of isolation from industry are over. "It's not the time to wait for somebody to give you money," he said. "More and more people believe that our work will pay off."
