Kutatás-Fejlesztés – Tudományszervezési Tájékoztató, 1985
1. szám - Bibliográfia
106POSSIBILITIES AND METHODS FOE THE ADVANCEMENT OF TECHNOLOGY In his paper Zoltán Pálmai discusses the role of technology in strengthening Hungarian economy. He reviews the attempts made at the systematization of technologies and mentions the spread of information technology as a new phenomenon, which has been induced by the modelling of technological processes. Nowadays the significance of information technology is increasing and penetrates other technologies as well. The author analyses the administrative and organizing activities of the National Medium-Range R+D Plan, suggesting the introduction of "rolling technique" at the start of projects. This technique permits competitive projects to be launched continually and, it is not necessary to allocate sectorial R+D resources adjusted to five-year plan periods in advance. The final conclusion of the paper is that it is less and less probable that the advancement of technology can take place without the enrichment of engineering sciences and, R+D activities are more and more indispensable to the wide-scale dissemination of the most advanced technologies. For small countries instead of the utilization of technologies resulting in the highest productivity it seems to be more expedient to apply microelectronics to which, nowadays, not new pieces of scientific knowledge but a high-level application of principles already known is wanted. THE SCIENCE POLICY SEMINAR OF THE CMEA COUNTRIES The scientific symposium "Science Policy and Planning Strategies of the European CMEA countries in the 1980s" was organized jointly by the Institute of Research Organization and the Sociological Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 8-11 October, 1984. In this paper the most important topics treated by the participants in the symposium are reviewed one by one. In addition to the national characteristics the science policies of most socialist countries show certain similarities. Setting longrange goals is of political significance. Sustained efforts to plan science are closely related to current economic methods of planning. Parallel to a recent breakthrough of the slogan "social planning" the application of research findings has got a priority,too. Basic research is coordinated by the network of academic institutions instead of universities which have been traditionally responsible for it. Industrial research is carried out in 'organizations independent of factories. The change of economic climate in the early eighties made the introduction of a restrictive science policy necessary, raising several problems. These are: To make scientific management and scientific communities accept compulsory economic .mea sures is not easy; proper balance between external and internal resources must be set; a forced choice between the provision of research equipment and the number of researchers' jobs must be made.
