COORDINATION OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
COORDINATION OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
One of the quiet reasons why some countries leap forward while others merely inch ahead is not intelligence, talent, or even money—it is coordination. Research and Development (R&D) is expensive, slow, risky, and often uncertain. Without coordination, it becomes fragmented, duplicative, and sometimes irrelevant to national needs.
Coordination of R&D simply means aligning people, money, facilities, and objectives toward shared priorities. It ensures that research is not done in silos, that scarce resources are not wasted, and that discoveries actually move from the laboratory to society. Countries that understand this treat R&D as a strategic national enterprise, not as a collection of disconnected projects.
As far as I know, the Philippines has no single entity that truly coordinates all R&D activities. Not even the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) does this comprehensively. During my time as a Foreign Service Officer at the Department of Foreign Affairs, I represented the DFA in the Science and Technology Coordinating Council (STCC). At that time, the STCC functioned—de facto—as the national coordinator of R&D. Even the Department of National Defense submitted its R&D plans to the Council, including those related to weapons systems, aircraft, and naval vessels.
Sadly, the STCC is now defunct, and nothing meaningful has replaced it.
Today, R&D activities are scattered across the DOST system, state universities and colleges, private universities, government agencies, and the private sector. Much of this work is valuable—but much of it is unaligned. Private-sector R&D often moves independently of government priorities, while university research may chase publications rather than national outcomes. The result is fragmentation, missed synergies, and lost opportunities.
Contrast this with how other countries operate.
The European Union runs Horizon Europe, the world’s largest coordinated R&D program, pooling the priorities and budgets of its member states around climate action, health, digital technologies, and food security. South Korea and Israel—both spending over 4% of GDP on R&D—coordinate research tightly around national industrial and security goals. The United States does the same through mission-driven agencies like DARPA, NIH, and NASA, all aligned under a clear strategic framework. China’s R&D is centrally coordinated and explicitly linked to long-term industrial and geopolitical objectives.
Even “big science” proves the point. CERN, the International Space Station, the Human Genome Project, and global agricultural research under CGIAR all exist because coordination makes the impossible possible.
Effective R&D coordination has clear objectives: strategic alignment with national goals, efficient use of resources, sharing of knowledge, management of risk, and faster movement from research to application. Mechanisms vary—centralized labs for basic research, hybrid models for applied development, decentralized units for product-specific work—but the unifying feature is oversight and coherence.
Of course, coordination is not easy. Communication silos persist. Short-term political or commercial pressures conflict with long-term research horizons. Intellectual property issues complicate collaboration. But these are problems to be managed—not excuses to do nothing.
Which brings me back to the Philippines. How I wish that somehow, someway, the STCC—or its modern equivalent—could be revived. It need not be purely governmental. A public-private R&D coordination council, with real authority, budget visibility, and strategic mandate, could do what no single agency can.
The question is simple but urgent: do we want R&D to remain fragmented and accidental, or do we want it to be deliberate, coordinated, and nation-building?
Because innovation without coordination is not a strategy—it is a gamble we can no longer afford.
RAMON IKE V. SENERES
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