The role of science is very great in modern society because it determines the development of society and the implementation of the results of scientific and technical progress in the economic sphere and everyday life of people. R&D, what is it? This is a combination of the first letters of some economic terms. R&D is an abbreviation that stands for research and development, understood as a set of works that are aimed at the emergence of new knowledge and their practical application in the development and creation of a new technology or product.
A large number of different organizations are related to R&D. These are various research institutes and their subdivisions, testing ranges, design bureaus and pilot production facilities.
R&D is a financially costly area of ​​the economy. For its development, it requires a lot of financial and material resources, as well as a very high qualification of workers, and therefore it is represented on a serious scale only in the most developed countries.
In the Soviet Union, much attention was paid to the development of research and development work. By the 90s of the 20th century, more than 2 million scientists worked in this industry. More than 70% of scientific developments and research in the Soviet Union took place in the Russian Federation. Science in the USSR included three sectors: industry, university and academic. The industry sector was most developed, where mainly military-industrial research institutes and design bureaus were represented.
Financing of science in Soviet times was carried out mainly from the state budget, which was sharply reduced in the 90s, which led to a significant reduction in the volume of research and development. The number of researchers in Russia in 2002 fell by more than two times compared with 1990, and amounted to 420 thousand people. Many workers from the scientific sphere switched to work in other, “commercial”, sectors: credit and financial activities, trade, etc. Some of the highly qualified specialists went to work in other countries.
In a particularly difficult situation fell research and design organizations that were located on the periphery. The demand for field research and development is very small. As a result, by the beginning of this century there is an even greater concentration of research and development in Moscow, the Moscow region (50% of all developments) and St. Petersburg (10% of all developments).
R&D in Russia is currently undergoing difficult times - the number of personnel engaged in research and development is decreasing. Nevertheless, the Russian Federation still ranks fifth in the world in terms of the number of personnel employed in R&D and the number of researchers
R&D is a rather costly structure, and primarily the state finances research and development, and therefore the decrease in the amount of money allocated for R&D is explained simply - the state “saves” on science. But such a “saving” only leads to a backward country in the economy. Private business, unfortunately, is not connected to research funding. Another reason for the sharp decline in R&D expenditures is a reduction in military spending, including military research and development, which made up a significant part of R&D in Soviet times.
In the modern world, a large economy without strong domestic science, which would be focused on its own advanced developments, at least in some leading areas, cannot achieve successes in the country's development, and therefore Concept 2020 implies an increase in development and research costs in 2020 to 3% .