HCM CITY — The HCM City’s Science and Technology Department plans to launch a municipal Science and Technology Development Fund while seeking to focus State science and technology organisations on activities relevant to the market and wean them off public funds in 2018.

“We will focus to strengthen science and technology applications in the business community and State offices as well as speed up the market for science and technology,” Nguyễn Việt Dũng, director of the department told the Sài Gòn Giải Phóng (Liberated Sài Gòn) newspaper.

Last year, the department implemented 367 scientific research projects and created 24 incubation centres.

There were around 666 startup projects, an increase of 133 per cent in comparison with yearly plan, that received support from such incubations.

The department also signed a co-operation agreement with the central and Central Highlands provinces of Bình Định and Gia Lai, and with Finland, France, Japan, South Korea and the World Bank.

“However, science and technology activities in 2017 has many limitations, such as a small and limited amount of funds for scientific development projects,” Dũng added.

The city’s technology market is considered very big, but limited transactions occur due to copyright protection and technology assessment.

“Connections between scientists and the market are very loose, the role of intermediate organisations is very dim, and human resources for technology assessment are limited.

“The city’s science and technology market still see the dominance of activities of buying and selling imported equipment and lacks more important ones, such as technology transfer or technology copyright selling and buying,” he added.

At present, the contribution of the science and technology market was ranked second in a group of nine key services with annual growth of 17 per cent. — VNS