Research & Knowledge Transfer

The UGC supports the institutions’ academic research activities through the allocation of the block grant, funding for research postgraduate places and various competitive research funding schemes such as Areas of Excellence, General Research Fund Scheme, Collaborative Research Fund Scheme and Joint Research Schemes with the Mainland and overseas countries. Through financial incentives and encouraging sharing of best practices among institutions and with overseas counterparts, the UGC also encourages institutions further to strengthen and broaden their endeavours in transferring knowledge, technology and other forms of research outputs into real socio-economic benefits and impacts for the community and businesses.

Starting from 2009-10, the UGC began to use the investment income of the $18 billion Research Endowment Fund to top up its allocation to the RGC supporting various competitive research funding schemes under its schedule. A portion of the Fund will be used to finance research projects on specific themes under the Themebased Research Scheme. Additional resources have been given to provide an extra 800 research postgraduate places. Among them, about 30% are reserved for the new Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme designed to internationalize Hong Kong’s PhD programmes. The remaining places are allocated to institutions through other means of competitive allocation. (Please see the chapter “Driving Excellence through Enhancing Competitiveness”)

Whereas the RGC is responsible for carrying out peer review of project-based research grant proposals, the UGC established a Research Group to advise on the strategy to promote excellence in research and to review the research assessment and funding method. Its objective includes working closely with institutions at such matters as how the research funding and research postgraduate student places should best be distributed to drive excellence, how to encourage research while keeping an appropriate balance with teaching, how to maintain and promote role differentiation, what is the best and effective way to allocate the research resources, etc.  

The UGC has continued its efforts in taking the research results to the community by organising lectures and publishing newsletters to share the research findings and policy recommendations with the community.

UGC Funding Support for institutions

(a) Research Expenditure and Funding 
The UGC-funded institutions continue to pursue research vigorously. Their reported aggregate expenditure on research in 2009/10 amounted to HK$6,835.1 million, representing 42% of the total expenditure in the academic departments of the institutions, and 0.4% of Hong Kong GDP. UGC and RGC funding, in the form of block grants and competitive research grants respectively, constituted the bulk of research funding for the institutions. Together, the two sources of funding made up about 75% of the total research expenditure in 2009/10 – breakdown is at Table 1. 

Table 1 – Research Expenditure of UGC-funded Institutions 2009/10

(b) Earmarked Competitive Research Grant
Apart from the block grants allocated by the UGC, the Earmarked Research Grant is the largest single source of funding for supporting academic research in Hong Kong’s higher education– and is managed and disbursed by the RGC based on competition and peer review. For 2010/11, the RGC administered a total of HK$775 million through its various funding schemes, an increase of about 4% as compared with 2009/10. There are four main funding schemes under the RGC: the General Research Fund; the Collaborative Research Fund; the Direct Allocation; and the Joint Research Schemes. The budgeted distribution amongst the major funding schemes is set out in Table 2.

Details of how these schemes operate and the success rates can be found on the RGC website(www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc) and in its Annual Report.

(c) Research Endowment Fund
The $18 billion Research Endowment Fund (REF) was established in February 2009 after approval was granted by the Legislative Council. The Fund has been set up as a trust under the Permanent Secretary for Education Incorporated. Its investment income replaces the existing earmarked research grants of the RGC, thus providing greater funding stability and certainty. A portion of its investment income will also support theme-based research, thus allowing the institutions to work on research proposals on themes of a more long-term nature and strategically beneficial to the development of Hong Kong.

(d) Theme-based Research Scheme
The Scheme is funded by the investment income from up to $4 billion of the Research Endowment Fund (i.e. about $200 million per annum assuming a 5% return). The objective of the scheme is to focus academic research efforts of the UGC-funded institutions on themes of strategic importance to the long-term development of Hong Kong. The Education Bureau is responsible for setting research themes for the Scheme, and the Bureau has established a Steering Committee on Research Themes to advise on this. After a series of consultation, including with the UGC, the RGC and the academic community, three themes were selected by the Education Bureau. Following that, the RGC worked with the local academic community and external experts, through compilation and scrutiny of “white papers” on proposed topics and in-depth discussion and deliberation at seminars and meetings, to formulate eleven proposed “grand challenge” topics, which were subsequently agreed by the Education Bureau upon the advice of the Steering Committee. The themes and topics for the first round applications are set out below:

Theme: “Promoting good health”

– Infectious diseases

– Genomic medicine

– Stem cells and regenerative medicine

Theme: “Developing a sustainable environment”

– Water pollution and water treatment

– Sustainable built environment

– Organic photo-voltaic and light emitting diodes

– Air quality

Theme: “Enhancing Hong Kong’s strategic position as a regional and international business centre”

– Hong Kong’s future as an international financial centre

– Promoting Hong Kong’s business through networking capability

– Promoting Hong Kong as a centre of excellence for business services innovation

– Entrepreneurship and enterprise organization

The RGC invited the UGC-funded institutions to submit preliminary research proposals in September 2010 and shortlisted 22 out of 89 such proposals for submission of full proposals. The funding results will be announced by the RGC in July 2011 after peer review and evaluation by the RGC.

(e) Early Career Scheme
The RGC will create a new peer reviewed funding scheme with a specific budget to support and nurture junior new academics with a view to attracting the best junior faculty academics and to strengthening the teaching–research nexus. 

Applicants should be within three years of their first full time academic appointment involving teaching and research, and duties to supervise research students (MPhil/PhD) independently. They must be employed in a substantiation track (i.e. tenure track) position as an Assistant Professor or equivalent position.

The new scheme will provide fund for both research projects and development of education activities. Apart from adopting the peer review mechanism to assess the academic quality of research proposal, new evaluation criteria will be formulated to assess the education component of the applications. 

We proposed that there should be two levels of award: – (a) Early Career Grants – the grantees will be provided with funding to undertake independent research work and develop educational activities; (b) Early Career Awards – the awardees will be given an honorary title in addition to the funding for research and educational activities.

(f) Proposals to Better Support Research in Disciplines under the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel
Having regard to the distinctiveness of disciplines under the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel, the RGC will set up new funding schemes to better support relevant academics to undertake research work:

(a) extending the scope of the teaching relief grants, which is part of the General Research Fund grants, from the existing four disciplines (Anthropology; Humanities and Creative Arts; Literature, Languages and Linguistics; and Law) to all disciplines under the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel. The teaching relief time will be increased from a minimum of four months to one semester so that applicants could obtain six to 12 months’ relief for a 24- to 36-month project; and;

(b) setting up a new prestigious fellowship scheme for outstanding investigators under the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel so that relevant academics with exceptional merit can be granted extended time-off and some supporting funds to enable them to focus on research work and writing.

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme

To attract the best and brightest students in the world, irrespective of their country of origin and ethnic background, to pursue their PhD studies and research in UGC-funded institutions, the RGC launched the annual Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme in September 2009. 

The Fellowship provides a monthly stipend of HK$20,000 and travel and research-related allowance of HK$10,000 per year for the awardees for a period of three years. 106 candidates among some 3 000 applicants from 100 regions received the award in the first round exercise for 2010/11.

To promote the second round of the Scheme for 2011/12, Chairman, RGC and institutional representatives conducted outreach visits to South America, Russia, Europe and eastern Europe from September to October 2010, and visited 24 top-tier institutions to exchange views with university staff as well as the students. 20 information sessions were held during these outreach visits. There were some 4023 applicants from 103 regions for the second round. By the end of March 2011, 125 candidates accepted the offer of fellowship.

This prestigious Scheme will unite top international research postgraduate students and Hong Kong’s world-class research institutions. It will help Hong Kong excel at research and widen our pool of talent and contacts.

The awardees of the 2010/11 round of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, RGC members, and representatives of institutions met at a tea reception on 4 November 2010 to exchange views and share experiences

Knowledge Transfer

The UGC promotes and incentivises the transfer of knowledge between institutions and the society, with a view to bringing about socio-economic impact and improvements to the community and businesses. Knowledge transfer encompasses a wide variety of activities, ranging from: transferring technology, undertaking commissioned research from business sectors; licensing patent rights to industries for product development; providing continuing professional education courses for specific fields; partnering with NGOs to optimise their provision of community services; outreaching to public “research outcomes” in the form of public talks, performance and exhibitions.

Since 2009/10 the UGC has introduced an additional stream of recurrent funding earmarked for the institutions to strengthen and broaden their endeavours in “knowledge transfer”. Institutions have all embraced “knowledge transfer” as the third pillar of their core activities (after teaching and research), they have set out institutional-wide strategies, policies, action plans and performance targets to embed and step up their efforts in knowledge transfer, commensurate with their respective roles and missions. Given that the institutions have distinctive roles and missions, and areas of strength, and are at different stages of development in knowledge transfer, the strategies of institutions vary in terms of their aims and approaches. All institutions are also setting aside some of their own funds to match the present knowledge transfer funding allocation in support of their strategy and plans. By and large, the effort is focused on building up institutional capacity and broadening their endeavors in knowledge transfer, specifically on three aspects – 

(i) Capacity Building (e.g. dedicated knowledge transfer office, databases, staff training, internal reach-out, process management)

(ii) Front-line knowledge Transfer Activities (e.g. patent filing, publicity, incubating spin-off companies)

(iii) knowledge Generation (e.g. proof-of-concept projects, or matching funds for downstream research)　

We were pleased to see that the first year effort was successful and all institutions enhanced their internal culture, enabling environment (e.g. management structure and staff incentives) and output volume for knowledge transfer. A marked increase was observed in both the quality and quantity of knowledge transfer (on average over 20% growth in terms of volume), and the central monitoring systems were also improved. The specific funding provided a fresh strategic impetus and inspired growing enthusiasm within the institution for pursuing knowledge transfer.

With the institutions’ concerted and more conscious efforts in knowledge transfer, academics and researchers are given more opportunities to be inspired by forging closer ties with the larger community, and the community may enjoy greater, realizable benefits from the knowledge transferred from the institutions. This two-way process enriches institutions’ research policies, thereby enhancing the international competitiveness of the local higher education sector.

In November 2010, the UGC joined hands with the Innovation and Technology Commission to sponsor the eight institutions to co-organise at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre a large-scale “Knowledge Transfer Conference”, attracting over 400 renowned overseas speakers, representatives from the industries and the businesses, senior management, academic staff, knowledge transfer practitioners and students of our institutions. The conference explored a wide range of aspects on knowledge transfer, with a full programme comprising business matching sessions, best practice sharing, policy forum and workshops inspiring students’ entrepreneurship, etc. The event was well-received.

The UGC joined hands with the Innovation and Technology Commission to sponsor the eight institutions to co-organise a “Knowledge Transfer Conference” in November 2010

Allocation of Knowledge Transfer Recurrent Funding to Institutions, 2010/11 ($ million)