Realistic Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration

Mototsugu Ito Vice Chairmen of the Board of Councillors, Nippon Keidanren President and Chief Executive Officer, Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co., Ltd.

In Japan, a number of national projects brought about the improvement in government and people's basic technologies and realization of human resources development, so that they had contributed to rapid modernization of industry and postwar high growth.

On the other hand, although industrial technologies of Japan mainly comes a catch-up and modification, the importance of originality tends to be minimized. Today, as a front-runner, we have to challenge to lots of technical possibilities, and the situation is compelled for selection and concentration of business resources in global competition.

As a problem of traditional industry-academia-government collaboration, the shortage of mutual understanding is mentioned first. The university side gave the students their theme for research every year, and their evaluation tended to be first priority. Meanwhile, the business side lacked an effort to tell the needs of company, not as an individual theme but as a strategic subject. Moreover, the government side lacked an understanding of significance such as needs of company, delivery date, intellectual property rights, and contracts. Although even talented-people exchange may dispatch people to the government side temporarily from a company, the barrier from government and academia to business organization is very high, and as for the job change, the retirement is required.

Based on these reflections, I think that the following three points are important for industry-academia-government collaboration in future.

First is the promotion of talented-people exchange among industry, academia and government. Whatever it may say, construction of the personnel management system for people exchange among industry, academia and government mutually is effective. Through this system, the academia and the government can understand company affairs and raise their talented people with knowledge and volition. And it can raise company people who have the capabilities for business in the academia and the government.

Secondly, for that purpose, the cooperation between company and university needs to strengthen the organized collaboration by coordinating researchers of company and instructors of university, not based on their individual connections.

Thirdly, it is sure that our efforts will get fruitful promotion of the inter-regional cooperation actively sought in recent years and the intellectual clusters as honest activity, which make the industry-academia-government collaboration to be the community-based development.