Tome Anticic State Secretary Ministry of Science and Education Croatia

START-UP ECOSYSTEM IN SOUTH EAST EUROPE: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Challenges: Dealing with the administration or procedures …

Challenges: Ingrained cradle to grave system, fear/shame of failure/risk averse

Opportunities: A lot of potential – time to focus on the best and see their needs

Horizon 2020- Teaming If passes phase II – 30 million Euros for a high tech innovation system

Change system to foster curiosity, excellence, international experience,

practical skills, …

Curricular reform at primary school level

Huge investment in trade schools, together with

modernizing the curriculum

Modern, internationalized tertiary schooling

Competitive and internationalized science

system

Bypass the system/jumpstart it – private initiatives:

Allow private enterprise as much as possible

Successfully made programming and robotics

and independent thinking both fun and mass

accessible – did more to the Croatian education

system them 25 years of “reforms”

This success enormously helped the

introduction of a much more modern/more

interactive primary school system, starting

experimentally this fall

BACKUP

• Realize more money in the existing system is mostly

wasted money

• Need sustained and long term effort from top to make system more relevant, more competitive, more western

• Need to change the mentality of the academic community and beyond

What is the Ministry of Science and Education doing to address the above?

• Pay scales – keep current ones, BUT allow large

payments from projects, and any further increase

only for the best ( project success)

• Link finance to universities on project success –

in this financing also include salaries (within 2

years)

• Provide new positions to groups with top projects

(H2020, ESFRI related)

• Internationalize everything as much as possible:

organisations, quality of project criteria, relevance

of publications, etc, etc

Motivate the best/enlarge their base/internationalisation

Internationalisation: in 2018 joined or in

process of joining key organizations

where Croatia already has an important

role, which will be further enhanced

IFMIF-DONES – 500 million Euro joint Spanish-Croatian ESFRI project!

Minister @astro_duque met with his Croatian

counterpart Blaženka Divjak and signed a

collaboration agreement to support the candidacy of

the city of Granada to host the IFMIF-Dones nuclear

fusion research center, an important project for the exploration of new sources of energy.

More planned changes

• Introduce tenure track!

• Introduce need for postdoc in a different institution, ideally outside home

country

• Remove legal obstacles for employing foreign experts – allow automatic

new position for top foreign and top Croatian expat staff

• increase Ph.D. positions (without an increase in permanent positions)

• Larger role/responsibilities of deans,directors, and governing councils.

But also easier to replace them

• Key positions need international project experience

• Introduce option for universities to be governed by Council/top down

• Much larger role of practical studies, with industry

Reaction to change…

“What if we don’t change

anything at all …

And something magical just

happens.”

Genetical engineering

medicine

Artificial Intelligence

big-data

nanotechnology and materials

robotics

. . .

Time P

rogr

ess

~ 5-20 years

Today

Radical measures are needed fast… Not just a Croatian/East Europe problem, but also an EU problem

compared to the EU average, the country's

performance in quality scientific outputs is

very low (41). This is largely due to scarce

public investment in R&D but also to a

fragmented landscape of higher education

institutions, a lack of incentives for

researchers' careers and a significant neglect

of the relevance of internationalising Croatia's

science and innovation arena.

EU country report 2018

Fragmentation on all levels hinders the cooperation between

research institutions and the business sector. Major universities

have highly fragmented governance structures, which reduces

efficiency and cooperation. Researchers lack incentives to

produce high quality science, as publications in journals,

irrespective of their quality, yield the same value for career

promotion. Integration of international researchers is difficult due

to rigid administrative rules. Cooperation with businesses is not

incentivised by the academic system, which discourages

commercialisation of scientific research. Researcher mobility

between the private and public sectors is difficult and the cross-

sector cooperation is under-developed

ZZDVO –buduća diskusija - upravljanje sveučilištem, gospodarstvo

Uspostaviti u zakon opciju da senat odluči koji sustav želi:

- sadašnji sustav (fakultetsko vijeće -> dekan

-> rector), ili

- sustav gdje sveučilišni savjet ima ključnu

ulogu (biranje rektora, statut, …) – sustav

koji imaju velika većina najboljih sveučilišta

Gospodarstvene aktivnosti visokih škola i instituta - kako poboljšati/da li je postojeći model dobar

- Praksa vani je da gospodarstvene aktivnosti budu izdvojene od institucija

The Cause of Science problems in EU13/Eastern

Europe

Dealing with the administration or figuring out the chain of command…

If, based on scientific and project results, the scientist should be given a leading role in the institution…

Reaction of academia if a scientist wants to focus on commercialization …

Galloping brain drain/open borders...

Welcome a foreign expert too often gets…

If an instrument in the neighboring lab would be useful to share…

The outdated equipment… (but often this is more an effect)

If want to reward top staff, let go of poorly performing staff, and hire quality new staff …