The Romanian Research-Development System - An Overview in Global Context

Research, development and innovation play an important role in ensuring sustainable economic growth. By producing new knowledge, research is essential to the development of new and innovative products, processes and services that contribute to increased productivity, industrial competitiveness and ultimately prosperity. For this reason, the encouragement of the research-development and innovation activities has become now an extremely important imperative of the modern socio-economic and technological policies in developed and less developed countries. The main objective of the present paper is to highlight Romania’s performance in the field while presenting the strengths and weaknesses of the national RDI system. In order to achieve the proposed objective, our methodology uses both descriptive and explanatory research. Our research methodology includes a comparative analysis based on Global Innovation Index and other indexes (mentioned in the paper). The analysis of the Global Innovation Index shows that the existing research-development-innovation system in Romania is not able to ensure overcoming the condition of being an emerging innovator, due to some of its weaknesses. Thus, our main finding shows that Romania has untapped potential in the field of RDI, and the current poor performance reflects negatively on the country's competitiveness and long-term growth prospects.