This is an interview with Professor Florin Gheorghe Filip, Vice-president of the Romanian National Academy of Sciences and member of the Jury for the Knowledge Economy Essay Contest organized in spring 2002 by eRomania Gateway Association and the World Bank Office in Romania.

eRG: How did you get involved so strongly with the development of an Information Society in Romania?

Professor Filip: I have been in this field since I graduated from college in 1970 and started working for the National Informatics Institute (ICI). I started as an IT systems and programs developer and became the Director of the Institute in 1991. In 1992, I was one of the evaluators working for the European Commission’s first research-development program called INCO PECO (International Cooperation with Central and Eastern European Countries) with the objective to promote a pan-European research community. It was at that moment I fully realized the impact of IT on human activities, not only on software production.

I am still an associated expert of the European Commission, and I have presided the “Information Society in Central and Eastern Europe” sections of several conferences organized in 1995 and 1996 by the European Commission and the Governments of the countries in the region. I was also an associated member of the NATO Committee for Computer Networks. In 2000 I was the only specialist from Eastern Europe who contributed to Intelligent Ambiance, a series of scenarios realized for the European Commission. In this work we presented a vision of the use of IT in the Europe of 2010. Recently I was appointed as a member of Information Society Advisory Group - ISTAG that provides the European Commission with independent advice concerning the strategy, content and direction of research work to be carried out under the IST Programme.

The National Informatics Institute (ICI) started promoting this concept (Information Society) in 1993: we have organized conferences, we sent related articles to the media, and we translated and distributed into Romania the first European document on information society – the so called Bangemann Report - into Romanian. In 2000, the Romanian Academy – an independent and scientifically reliable body – was assigned by the Romanian President to draft a strategy regarding information society. I was appointed to coordinate this project that resulted in a “vision building” project on Information Society - Knowledge Society in Romania. More than 40 domestic and international specialists from the Romanian Academy, universities, research institutes and the IT industry were involved in this project.

eRG: Which Romanian institutions could implement or influence the implementation of the knowledge based economy in Romania? Should any other structures be founded?

Professor Filip: I don’t think any new structures are needed. I know there is already a Group for Information Technology run by the Prime Minister; there is also the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology that initiated a number of legal projects to build the regulatory framework for the Information Society. From my perspective, public administration can also play an important role as the first user of the new technologies.

Also, the Romanian Academy, the universities and the research institutes must identify and emphasize, on scientific basis, the goals to be pursued for becoming an Information Society. I believe that private companies should use utmost the new tools for running their businesses and training people for the Information Society, and finally, NGOs – such as eRomania Gateway– can be a leading factor in building public awareness upon the importance of the Information Society..

eRG: How do you envision that the strong academic tradition will work within the context of market-based economy, how could the knowledge based economy contribute to the consolidation of the academia?

Professor Filip: We have a strong academic tradition in the IT field in Romania. The first evidence of this was in 1957, when Romania was the 8th country worldwide to make a computer at the Atomic Physics Institute. Since then, several other things have been achieved: the design of the first national network started in 1972 (only few years after the ARPA – US Advanced Research Projects Agency -initiative) and in 1999 we had a 19 nodes functional national network., the first local area network (LAN) was designed and produced in 1982 and Romanian Academician M. Draganescu anticipated the Information Society at the end of the ‘70s.

Nowadays it’s rather difficult to differentiate academic research from development; we can see many people from academia involved in concrete IT projects. They play an important role throughout the product development process, from the basic research to the prototype of final product. Academia is also carrying out some theoretical studies.

I am glad to say that Romania is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe to be represented this year among the 20 winners of the European Information Technology Prizes. The awardee is a private company (SOFTWIN) and not an academic institution, but their results are based on the critical mass of knowledge generated by the academia and I think this is a remarkable accomplishment. This facilitates contracts and contracts bring incomes or endowments – I say this is a mutually beneficial relationship emerging between academic research and the market.

eRG: How has the institutional heritage bequeathed by 50 years of centralized economic planning affected Romania's capacity to transition to a knowledge-based economy today?

Professor Filip: I believe this in an obvious answer: it had a tremendous negative influence upon people of my age or upon the older ones. But the young generation is enormously receptive - I can see it when I'm looking at my children. Free circulation of information makes the impact of this heritage to be blurred up to 99%; the rest is not important anymore.

eRG: How could the international donors, including the World Bank, support the implementation of knowledge based economy in Romania?

Professor Filip: This can be done by carefully selecting and funding some projects in the field. I believe the World Bank already has a very good tradition in this sector: the completed projects linked to university research, the new project aiming at schools’ endowment with computers, the Knowledge Economy Essay Contest organized by Romania Country Gateway in collaboration with the World Bank Office in Romania – these are just a few examples. International donors play an important role; I don’t think we could advance rapidly or keep up with the global trends without them.

eRG: Please think of a concrete example to point out, in your opinion, the practical outcomes of a functional knowledge based economy in Romania.

Professor Filip: The first example that comes into my mind is the sale of original ideas and research projects performed by the National Informatics Institute. Since 1994 we had clients from Germany, France, or Australia and they didn't want just software products realized in accordance to their specifications; they also paid for ideas, ideas based on knowledge elements that we accumulated in time.