According to KIM’s state secretary, nearly HUF 150 billion will be allocated to the innovation program strategy

Balázs Hankó said that companies can use HUF 93 billion of the amount, HUF 30 billion to support the career of researchers, and HUF 24 billion to support the international research ecosystem. The goal is for Hungary to be among the ten most innovative countries in Europe by 2030, he said.

As he said: they want to focus the innovation resources on the areas in which Hungarian research and development is good. Such areas are healthy living, digitization and the green transition.

According to his explanation, the development of these areas is helped by the Science parks created near the universities,

and the network of national laboratories. Furthermore, they want to make the use of artificial intelligence a part of everyday life in vocational training and higher education, he added.

Balázs Hankó highlighted that the main goal of the renewal of higher education is to support such researches, which help our progress in line with the nation’s capabilities. The planned establishment of the Neumann Institute also serves this purpose. One of its most important missions will be to connect artificial intelligence with health data processing, he added.

He emphasized that Hungary is 96th in the world in terms of population, 33rd in terms of innovation performance, and 11th in terms of the number of Nobel laureates per million inhabitants.

This creates a good basis for increasing our innovation performance – he said, pointing out that as a result of this, the country was transferred from the “emerging innovator” category to the “European innovator” category in Europe last year.

At the same time, more research and development activities are necessary for progress, he indicated.

The goal is to increase the number of research and development scientists per one million inhabitants from today’s 6 thousand to 9 thousand by 2030.

Furthermore, doubling is also necessary in the field of intellectual property, patents and trademark registrations, he said.

For this, the innovation expenditure must be increased from today’s HUF 920 billion, one-third of which comes from the state and two-thirds from the market. The latter source is largely due to Hungary’s pharmaceutical and health industry, research related to healthy living, explained Balázs Hankó.

Featured image: Balázs Hankó, the State Secretary responsible for innovation and higher education at the Ministry of Culture and Innovation, gives a speech at the Hungarian Healthcare Management Association’s conference on “Data-driven healthcare and cyber security” (Photo: MTI/Zoltán Balogh)