A Collaborative Trans-Regional R&D Strategy for the South Korea Green New Deal to Achieve Future Mobility

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea is moving to establish a national industry strategy to reduce regional inequalities within the country through the Green New Deal. Thus, it is important to closely integrate the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the Green New Deal with that of reducing deepening regional inequality from the Regionally Balanced New Deal. To accomplish these dual aims, this study provides a collaborative trans-regional R&D strategy and a precise framework with three key dimensions: regional, technological, and organizational. We demonstrate that future mobility is the most important project of the Green New Deal, comprising 1963 nationally funded projects worth USD 1285.4 million. We also illustrate the level of government investment in nationally funded research projects related to future mobility for 17 different regions and seven different technology clusters related to future mobility, and determine which research organizations played an important role in each cluster for all 17 regions between 2015 and 2020. Our results indicate that the capital region and Daejeon have high innovation capability in many future mobility-related research fields, whereas some regions have capabilities in specific research fields such as hydrogen infrastructure, indicating their relative competitiveness.

Research and Development Investment and Collaboration Framework for the Hydrogen Economy in South Korea

“…Thus, a long-term commitment to public support and funding toward green R&D is required to accomplish the transition to the hydrogen economy [7,15], as supported by the need for an R&D investment and collaboration framework, which considers the trends of the investment and R&D spectra of the hydrogen-economy-related technology segments of the value chain of the hydrogen economy, to promote the government's commitment. Moreover, as emphasized in our previous study [54], the framework would also present the information on the regional variations that are caused by differences in the endowment of relevant assets, although it is challenging to reduce the regional inequality via a transregional research collaboration approach. In our last study [54], we proposed the transregional collaboration framework and demonstrated it with a sample of future mobility.…”

“…Moreover, as emphasized in our previous study [54], the framework would also present the information on the regional variations that are caused by differences in the endowment of relevant assets, although it is challenging to reduce the regional inequality via a transregional research collaboration approach. In our last study [54], we proposed the transregional collaboration framework and demonstrated it with a sample of future mobility. However, it is necessary to elaborate the previously proposed framework to present more valuable information about the R&D-spectrum-based research collaboration among academia, research institutes, and industries in Korea, thus establishing a systematic approach for creating a new green value chain for the hydrogen economy by combining the existing innovative capabilities of various research organizations.…”

“…To elucidate the disciplinary characteristics of the research fields that corresponded to these nationally funded research projects, the All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) model was employed in the machine learning process by utilizing author keywords in approximately one million articles that were found in Scopus, i.e., the features, as well as the ASJC code that was assigned to each paper, i.e., the labels. Thereafter, according to the similarity, which was calculated based on the ASJC classification model, and the procedures of previous studies [54], three ASJC codes were assigned to each nationally funded research project. The probability of the relevance of each assigned ASJC code was determined based on the title and abstract of the nationally funded research project.…”

“…Based on previous studies [51,52,54,55], a co-occurrence technique was employed to identify the hydrogen-economy-related research fields. The number of times the ASJC codes appeared together in a project group revealed the relevance of that project.…”

“…By visualizing this network structure, the relationship between the ASJC codes could be elucidated. The mapping and clustering were calculated based on previous studies [51,52,54,55].…”