The government has allocated Rp 5 trillion (US$356.4 million) for research endowment funds in 2020, five times the allocated Rp 990 billion in 2019.

The budget allocation for education, which accounts for 20 percent of overall spending as required by law, is projected to rise by 5.7 percent to surpass the half-a-quadrillion mark, totaling Rp 505.8 trillion.

The Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry’s research enhancement and development director general, Muhammad Dimyati, told The Jakarta Post recently that the endowment funds would be used to finance the National Research Priorities that would be detailed further in the 2020-2024 National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN).

Dimyati said the priorities would cover more than a dozen focus areas, including food and agriculture; renewable energy; medicine; transportation; technical engineering; security and defense; maritime; social and humanities, arts and culture, education; multidisciplinary fields including disasters, biodiversity, stunting and environment, water and climate.

“From our latest meeting, we feel that 49 national products could be generated from said areas by 2024,” he said.

Indonesia still lags behind in terms of research and innovation, as shown by the 2018 Global Innovation Index (GII) that placed the country in 85th place of 126 countries, or 14th out of 15 Southeast Asian and Oceania countries.

The 2020-2024 RPJMN made available on the website of the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) attributed the country’s low innovation to, among other issues, higher education’s insufficient capacity as the source of technological innovation, making it unable to support the triple helix model.

In terms of research productivity, data shows that Indonesia is catching up with its neighboring countries. Citing scival.com, the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry's academic database Sinta showed that Indonesia topped other ASEAN countries last year with 34,007 Scopus-indexed publications after falling behind Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand in the previous years.

However, according to SCImago Journal & Country Rank on its website scimagojr.com, citations of the country's publications remained lower than those of Singapore and Malaysia.

As part of its efforts to improve the country’s research ecosystem, the government has announced a plan to recruit foreign rectors and lecturers for local universities, which is expected to boost the rankings of the universities on the global stage.

“One of the challenges right now is at the level of universities. Some top Indonesian universities have not entered the top 300 global universities list. We hope that cooperation between foreign and local universities can help [the latter] enter the top 100 list, at least at the regional level,” Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto said on Aug. 25 in Jakarta, as quoted by the ministry’s press release.

He went on to say that transfers of knowledge and capacity-building processes during such cooperation would improve research and development in the country.

The plan received welcome responses from foreign academics, including the vice-chancellor of Melbourne University Duncan Maskell.

Maskell said that Indonesia had just as many capable and skilled academics as any other countries, but collaboration with their foreign counterparts could possibly lead to improvements in research and education.

“I think there’s a great deal of benefit from getting lots of international people into a place that bring insights from different systems, different cultures and different outlooks on life, which are always positive and synergistic. For universities, it’s very important,” he told the Post in a recent interview.

Following the signing of the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement this year, the University of Melbourne has launched a new five-year strategy to build closer partnerships in Indonesia, increase joint research projects and help develop a world-class higher education system in the country.

One of the key initiatives is a postdoctoral program offering training for Indonesian scholars.

According to the technocratic draft of the RPJMN, which cited various sources, only 16.45 percent of 249,621 lecturers in the country hold a doctoral degree.

Indonesia-born academic Vedi Hadiz, who is also the University of Melbourne’s assistant deputy vice-chancellor international for Indonesia, said the government had invested a lot of money into producing PhD holders. However, the problem did not necessarily stem from numbers, but rather the discouraging system that holds them back upon their return to their university, he said.

“Although the government has encouraged research by academics, other parts of the system as a whole [create disincentives] by encouraging as much teaching as possible […] How do you develop the system whereby your best researchers are still excellent teachers; their teaching is infused by their research and their research is infused by their teaching?” he said.

He suggested that those who have attained their degrees abroad with outstanding performances be allowed not to return home immediately, but rather be given the opportunity to become postdoctorate fellows in foreign universities. That way, they could learn to write research grants, write and publish journal articles as well as develop syllabuses.

“I think that if enough Indonesians have that experience before they come back to Indonesia, then when they come back, they will be equipped with more skills and affect change within their own systems,” Vedi said.

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