S&T has been considered as a key motivation of the fast and sustainable development process. Over the past years, S&T activities have gained very encouraging achievements and created new development directions for this field, especially in the country’s renovation process. However, due to the fact that our country’s poor conditions, facilities and investment budget for S&T activities are still limited and the implementation process is faced with many difficulties while the economic management mechanism in the renovation process and especially for the competition pressure within regional and international integration conditions; S&T activities are still faced with challenges.

The discussion was focused on 3 main topics: S&T remarkable achievements in 5 years from 2006 – 2010 contributed to the country’s social and economic development objectives; solutions to improve national S&T potentials for the 2010 – 2015 period; roles and responsibilities of executive agencies under Ministries, branches and localities in the implementation of S&T tasks.

In the discussion, Dr. Nguyễn Quân shared S&T achievements gained over the past 5 years: the first achievement is to basically develop the S&T legal framework. The Ministry has formulated and submitted to the National Assembly 7 important laws, without which it would be difficult for Vietnam to enter WTO and the international economy as law on intellectual property, law on technology transfer, law on technical standards, law on product and good quality, metrology law. In the electronics field, we have designed and manufactured super-field and super-axle crane systems for hydro-electricity stations. We have also manufactured vaccines at a high level. In the health field, we have been successfully transplanted the viscera and heart and mastered high and strong technologies for production of goods for the economy.

With those achievements we have reached strategic S&T objectives by 2010.

For the coming time, Vietnam needs to have breakthrough decisions on renovating the economic mechanism and S&T management mechanism, taking measures on strengthening the national S&T potentials so that we can avoid being left behind in terms of S&T and dependence on imported technologies.