Indonesia’s research and innovation landscape is evolving from a patchwork system into one with clearer purpose and stronger national coordination. With a vast population, rapid digital adoption and an increasingly assertive national research agency, the country is working to transform its scale and natural endowments into sustained scientific capacity. At the same time, it grapples with long-standing challenges — low research intensity, uneven regional capability and a pressing need to strengthen talent pipelines and infrastructure.
The national picture is best understood through the key metrics. Indonesia’s gross domestic expenditure on R&D remains modest, hovering around 0.28 to 0.30 percent of GDP in recent years. Researcher density has risen but remains relatively low, counted in the hundreds of full-time researchers per million people — far below high-performing regional peers. In the Global Innovation Index 2025, Indonesia places 55th out of 139 economies, signalling gradual improvement but also underscoring the distance still to go for a country of its size and ambition.
National priorities have become more explicit and strategic. The creation and expansion of the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) consolidated multiple research bodies into a single coordinating institution, giving Indonesia a clearer direction for science policy. Research priorities now span food security, climate resilience, public health, digital transformation, clean energy, semiconductors and critical-mineral value chains. BRIN’s leadership has repeatedly emphasised that research must deliver socio-economic impact and support Indonesia’s long-term development vision toward 2045. This mission-oriented approach aims to ensure that R&D addresses national needs while building globally competitive capabilities.
The focus on talent reflects this ambition. BRIN and universities are expanding postgraduate programmes, promoting research fellowships and offering incentives to attract Indonesian researchers back from overseas. Officials consistently link talent development with national competitiveness. As BRIN’s chair has stressed, education and research must form the foundation for prosperity — a call that resonates in a country striving to move from resource dependence to knowledge-led growth. Yet retention remains difficult. Research careers face competition from higher salaries in the private sector and opportunities abroad, creating a pattern of “brain circulation” rather than a guaranteed domestic research workforce.
The private sector is becoming a more important part of Indonesia’s innovation engine. The country’s enormous domestic market and vibrant digital economy have attracted multinational R&D investment and propelled homegrown startups in fintech, logistics, ed-tech and increasingly deep tech. Recent moves to establish a national AI roadmap and explore mechanisms such as a sovereign AI fund reflect a desire to build the data, compute and talent infrastructure needed for AI adoption and innovation. Policymakers see AI as a cross-cutting catalyst for health, agriculture, manufacturing and public administration, and are working to ensure that regulatory clarity and market scale translate into real investment.
Still, structural constraints persist. R&D spending remains low compared with Indonesia’s aspirations, and public funding — despite reforms — continues to be spread across multiple ministries, slowing coordination. Research capacity is heavily concentrated in Java, leaving many provinces under-resourced and disconnected from national strategies. This geographic imbalance limits Indonesia’s ability to leverage its full scientific potential and makes nationwide innovation uneven.
On research outputs, signs of progress are emerging but still relatively early. Publication rates and patent filings have increased, and Indonesia’s digital sectors have successfully produced high-growth firms and exportable services. However, large-scale translational success stories — innovations that move from lab to market at scale — remain limited. Policymakers recognize this bottleneck and are strengthening technology-transfer offices, proof-of-concept funding and industry co-investment schemes to close the so-called “valley of death” between research and commercialization.
Infrastructure investment is being targeted more strategically than in previous years. Instead of dispersing resources, Indonesia is focusing on scalable facilities such as AI compute clusters, semiconductor testbeds, biotechnology labs and regional innovation hubs. These investments aim to align limited public funds with industrial sectors where Indonesia has or can build comparative advantage — including semiconductors, green minerals processing, agro-biotech and digital technologies. The government hopes that targeted facilities will attract matching private investment and foreign partnerships capable of accelerating capability development.
Governance reforms are continuing in parallel. Indonesia is simplifying research funding processes, encouraging co-funding from industry and working to strengthen data governance, cybersecurity and intellectual property frameworks. Emerging technologies, especially AI, remain a balancing act: government agencies are promoting adoption and innovation while developing safeguards around privacy, misinformation and equitable access. These policy debates reflect Indonesia’s effort to integrate frontier technologies in a way that supports growth without compromising trust or social inclusion.
Looking ahead, Indonesia’s most viable strategy builds on its natural strengths. The country can leverage its large and diverse population, vast natural resources, expanding tech ecosystem and strategic geographic position to develop high-impact research clusters. Success would involve steady increases in GERD — driven increasingly by private-sector spending — a significant jump in researcher density, and the emergence of export-oriented, research-led industrial clusters that generate skilled jobs and technological spillovers. Achieving this will require disciplined execution: aligning ministries, streamlining funding, retaining talent and expanding targeted infrastructure.
Indonesia’s innovation rise will not be instantaneous, but the foundations are strengthening. A large market, strong political commitment to BRIN, growing digital industries and an evolving policy framework give the country a credible pathway from an archipelago of potential to an archipelago of innovation. The challenge now is pace and coordination—ensuring that people, funding and institutions move fast enough, and together enough, to convert momentum into sustained, research-driven economic growth.
