Slovenian Researchers at the Crossroads: Analysis and Proposal of Actions to Encourage Greater Efficiency of Scientific Research Activities

The study provides an analysis of the situation and elaborates proposals to improve the efficiency of scientific research activities in Slovenia. The research has been pursued by the following objectives: 1) to identify the most powerful factors impacting the patent activity, 2) the available data to carry out the international comparability of performance in patenting and 3) to identify the relationship between patenting and successful commercialization of knowledge, which has been developed with the help of public funds. This was achieved either by a quantitative survey among Slovenian researchers with the most patents (included in the SICRIS database), which was based at the European study of patent activity PATVAL, and with the comparison of the organization and performance of the best domestic and foreign universities (and their patent offices) for which we developed our own conceptual model. One key finding is that in the number of scientific publications (per million inhabitants), Slovenia is placed among top developed countries. Slovenia performs worse in term of citations, while its weakest part concerns the commercialization of its scientific results. One of the biggest shortcomings of Slovenia are therefore a lack of clearly defined and poorly implemented practices of knowledge transfer from scientific research to the business sector and partly research directions, which are due to poor links with the economy less focused on the usefulness to the business sector. Based on these and other observations have been made several proposals to improve the organization and increase the efficiency of scientific research of Slovenian researchers and Slovenia's patent offices.