With this approach, innovation to remain on paper only

In recent days, we have often been hearing ministers say, "We'll give importance to innovation and research and development in the upcoming period." In fact, this was being discussed for a while now but not much of a progress has been made in these areas.

For example, in the area of research and development, there has been an increase in the share of funds allocated from the budget. If you ask whether this share is enough, it of course isn't. Despite this, if you ask whether the increased R&D funds had a contribution, they of course did, but very little because the understanding of support is not rational. An R&D support system driven by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) has been adopted, but as we sometimes see from the news, the projects which were suitable for Turkey's scientific needs and were responded to globally were not in question. Of course, sometimes important and useful projects come up but in comparison to the distributed money, these are very little in number. On this point, the support given to acquaintances is always talked about as well as the fact that a follow-up is never done on whether these projects have been concluded or not. Now, together with the R&D, we talk about the innovation concept, but as long as there is the same understanding, it is not possible to receive a result. Just like the public resources allocated to innovation and technology development are very limited, the understanding is similarly wrong. In the biotechnology conferences that I have formerly attended, I remember my conversations with bureaucrats with whom I visited business incubation centers that have become the centers of innovations in the world. I saw that a centralized statist planning understanding is still...