White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation

"Open innovation: The basic premise of open innovation is to introduce more actors into the innovation process so that knowledge can circulate more freely and be transformed into products and services that create new markets, fostering a stronger culture of entrepreneurship and encouraging firms to use external and internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technologies.

Open science: Open science refers to an approach to research based on greater access to public research data enabled by information and communications technology (ICT) tools and platforms, broader collaboration in science – including the participation of non-scientists – and the use of alternative copyright tools for diffusing research results....

Finally, open platforms could have an amplifying effect by dramatically increasing the pool of individuals available to address a given question and decreasing the time to develop solutions, ultimately decreasing the time to market. The DST will therefore continue to explore opportunities and barriers (e.g. IP and mission conflicts) for universities, science councils, government and the private sector to participate in open collaboration platforms....

 The DST is actively examining the transition to open science and open innovation. This will call for appropriate regulatory frameworks and data skills development, as discussed below....

Incentives for open science will be fostered through education programmes and career development programmes for researchers. A focus on citizen science will also be introduced. Barriers to open science will be evaluated and where necessary removed, ensuring that legislation and practice support, rather than thwart, the principles of open and collaborative science. Government will therefore review these, taking into account certain aspects of IPR from publicly funded research and accepting that open science, open innovation and IP, and the associated rights, are not mutually exclusive. Government will also review the policies and institutions governing access to research data and research publications...."