Challenges for innovation system
Vietnamese system of innovation has some strengths and weaknesses.1
Vietnam has a
quite large number of S&T personnel and institutions available to carry out R&D,
although the age structure of research staff is highly skewed with averages falling
between 55 and 60. More broadly, there are nearly one million graduates from
approximately one hundred universities or colleges spread throughout the country and
some 1.3 million have attended technical training institutes. This human resource and
institutional base contrasts sharply with the situation in the vast majority of less
developed countries when they sought to achieve rapid modernization. An extreme
and often-cited example is that of Zambia which as it is claimed had less than two
dozen university graduates and a handful of trained technicians at the time of its
independence. At a minimum, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is an
important and promising foundation on which to build.