Thailand's R&D spending was a year ahead of schedule, reaching 1% of GDP in 2017, worth 155 billion baht, mainly driven by big corporations aspiring to produce high value-added products, with the automotive, food and petroleum sectors leading the pack.
The country aims to have R&D spending reach 1.5% of GDP by 2021 and 2% of GDP or 340 billion baht by 2026 through a research and innovation fund, skilled research development and shifting to frontier research on food and nutrition, aerospace, agriculture and the circular economy.
The private sector needs new skills in the workforce for future industries, with some 107,046 jobs projected in the next five years in digital, aeronautics/logistics, medical, automation/robotics and fuel/biochemicals fields.
The private sector continues to drive innovation in Thailand because of intense competition, and businesses have created differentiation by offering high-value products, said Kittipong Promwong, secretary-general of National Science Technology and Innovation Policy Office.
Thailand's R&D spending was 0.7-0.8% of GDP in past years and was expected to reach 1% in 2018, but the target was met one year ahead of schedule thanks to government privileges for small businesses and startups/innovation, the expansion of the Science Park in the region and the Food Innopolis scheme.
The private sector spent 124 billion baht, 80% of the total, while the rest was from the public sector.
Private R&D spending grew by 50%, 0.8% of GDP in 2017, of which 13 billion baht was from multinational corporations. Thailand's private R&D spending was higher than the global average of 8%.
The top three areas of private sector spending were automotive, food and petroleum at 18 billion, 16 and 11 billion baht, respectively.
Automotive saw the highest spending in manufacturing with 18 billion baht, while finance and insurance were the highest in services worth 6 billion. Department store/convenience store/groceries totalled 10 billion baht on R%D, the highest for retail/wholesale.
"We will focus on frontier research in line with the country's vision, as frontier research has a return of 10 times investment, higher than five times for conventional R&D," he said. "But frontier research requires 30 times higher investment than conventional research."