What 3.4 Trillion Won in R&D Funding Reveals — When Mapped as a Network
Between 2016 and 2018, the South Korean government invested a total of KRW 3.4569 trillion in R&D projects across the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region. Yet the most important question hidden behind that figure is not simply where the money went — it is how the funded technologies are connected to one another. Those connections, more than investment volumes alone, determine the true competitiveness of a regional research ecosystem. This post introduces a study that applied social network analysis (SNA) to 14,798 government R&D projects in the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region to diagnose the structural characteristics of its technology ecosystem and inform strategic investment priorities. (Cho, Yoo, & Yang, 2020)
Background
The structure of technology linkages that raw numbers cannot show
Conventional approaches to analyzing regional R&D investment largely stop at counting how much was spent in each field and how many patents or papers were produced. These methods reveal the performance of individual technology domains, but they cannot capture the degree to which those domains are organically linked — or the synergies those linkages might generate.
Regional industrial ecosystems are growing more complex. Fields such as energy, information and communications technology (ICT), and bio-health do not develop in isolation; they cross-pollinate and converge. Without understanding how these connections are structured, it is difficult to assess whether government investment is actually activating the regional R&D ecosystem.
That gap was the motivation for this study. Designing truly region-specific R&D investment strategies requires evidence-based analysis of the relational structure among technology domains — not just their individual outputs.