At the Cabinet meeting held today, Premier Chang San-cheng affirmed the Ministry of Science and Technology's (MOST) performance in recent years and requested that the MOST cooperate with the Ministry of Economic Affairs to fully exert academia's capability to assist with industrial transformation.
"The MOST has a wide range of tasks, including academic research support, science and technology (S&T) talent cultivation, science park settlement, large-scale shared experimental facilities, disaster prevention resources integration, energy technologies, and smart electronics, and it has produced highlights in all of them," Premier Chang noted after being briefed by the MOST on the outcome of S&T development promotion. He expressed gratitude to the agency's former and current heads and staffers for their efforts over the past years.
Since being upgraded from the National Science Council in 2014, the MOST has been a catalyst in bringing the industrial and academic sectors together, pointed out the premier. He noted that the ocean and space technologies promoted by the MOST's major laboratories like the Taiwan Ocean Research Institute and National Space Organization as well as the planned August 2016 launch of Taiwan's domestically developed satellite FORMOSAT-5 are highly anticipated by the general public.
The MOST also organizes the quadrennial National Science and Technology Conference, which lays the foundation for national S&T development, the premier said. The 10th such conference will take place in the fourth quarter of this year, and Chang emphasized that it will put economic development at the top of the agenda and discuss the innovation economy, following the policy directions of the past several years and designing a longer-term plan. Chang requested the MOST continue keeping society's needs in mind in implementing the conference planning.
According to the MOST, the 10th National Science and Technology Conference will be based on the concept of a smart, low-carbon, and healthy society, and will focus on issues involving economic development, well-being and safety, and infrastructural environment so as to formulate a national S&T development plan for the next four years. The government's future S&T development efforts are expected to bear fruit in five key areas: the innovation economy, improvement of national health, strengthening of societal security, reinforcement of talent cultivation mechanisms, and creation of a good research and development environment.