I'd venture that Japanese technological innovation is being hampered by a system of public and tertiary education that is systemically unresponsive to economic needs, and a failure to teach its students to think critically, analytically and creatively while seeking to avoid both controversy and personal accountability. The metrics employed to assess student achievement do not measure important aspects of educational outcomes. Japan has the lowest rate of graduate school enrolment in the G7, and only a handful of universities that can be considered on a par academically with top universities overseas. Underfunding of education across the board by the central government, the low cost of university tuition and commensurately low pay of professors and researchers, the difficulty in hiring qualified professors from overseas, and the difficulty of raising private sector funds and impediments to collaboration with industry also play an important role in hampering technological innovation.
Thank you Richard for this first insightful summary of your research. Without any pretension to preempt the subsequent topics you will cover, I would like to contribute. In addition to the linear and output concepts you have detailed, I feel there is also the significant issue of culture. Japan is insular in its business practices, especially in regards to the adoption of new foreign technologies. This is exacerbated by the pyramid structure of large company decision making in Japan, which is a lengthy process. Over 20 years I have worked between engineers in large Japanese and non-Japanese corporations. Often the opportunity is there for new knowledge to be adopted and productively integrated into a Japanese context. However the decision making process at each level of the pyramid is so time consuming that, often by the time the final decision is reached at the top tier (2-3 years is not unusual), the ideal ‘window of opportunity’ has narrowed for many reasons. This greatly impedes the opportunity for tacit knowledge spillover here in Japan. Obviously there is the language barrier which has not diminished to any productive degree. Then there are the cultural barriers of domestic insularity and intra-corporate/institutional siloed practices. Insularity, in brief, results in a preference for the ‘wheel to be reinvented’ and domestically produced by Japanese corporations within Japan. Silo-ism results in different portions of the same company/institution working on the same technologies without any awareness of what their peers are doing. The desire for each sub-division to protect its own interests, has been a common yet clandestinely cited cause. Japan’s offshore wind development provides a convenient example of these siloed and and insular practices in action.
Various government institutions were mapping the same offshore area sites without sharing information - siloism. A large Japanese corporation underbid all the other foreign participants that could have shared expertise. An insular predilection that resulted in a further delay for Japanese OSW energy to get jumpstarted. It was deemed appropriate for almost everything to be done domestically at ‘any practical cost’ to efficiency, resulting in insufficient funding and knowledge.
In a technological world where ‘Moore’s law’ is no longer restricted to microchips, delays in technological adoption is hardly efficient for the environment or the economy. A knock-on effect may be that core researchers - already falling in number in Japan as you have indicated - can also be tempted to find more receptive terrain for their talents abroad…
Just as some of the most significant advances in medical technology are the result of war, I suspect that government funding related to the "military-industrial complex" probably helps support a lot of basic science in the U.S. As the U.S. begins to look to Japan to augment its military development and production needs, perhaps this source of funding will help spur more investment in basic science in Japan. What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
Industry concentration, Germany (although its supposedly been undergoing some amount of deindustrialization recently) still has its vibrant ecosystem of SMEs. And that *sort* of set up resembles old America when its was kicking but across many fields. And back then, at least from what I've read may times, applied-basic was very much a two way street. But this is part of the idea/policy set/even just thought experiment that is seemingly illegal: maybe decentralization, deconcertation, and diversification/heterogenization are good for science (among other things)?
Thank all of you for your comments. I'm at a conference now and will respond in the next day or two.
I'd venture that Japanese technological innovation is being hampered by a system of public and tertiary education that is systemically unresponsive to economic needs, and a failure to teach its students to think critically, analytically and creatively while seeking to avoid both controversy and personal accountability. The metrics employed to assess student achievement do not measure important aspects of educational outcomes. Japan has the lowest rate of graduate school enrolment in the G7, and only a handful of universities that can be considered on a par academically with top universities overseas. Underfunding of education across the board by the central government, the low cost of university tuition and commensurately low pay of professors and researchers, the difficulty in hiring qualified professors from overseas, and the difficulty of raising private sector funds and impediments to collaboration with industry also play an important role in hampering technological innovation.
Thank you Richard for this first insightful summary of your research. Without any pretension to preempt the subsequent topics you will cover, I would like to contribute. In addition to the linear and output concepts you have detailed, I feel there is also the significant issue of culture. Japan is insular in its business practices, especially in regards to the adoption of new foreign technologies. This is exacerbated by the pyramid structure of large company decision making in Japan, which is a lengthy process. Over 20 years I have worked between engineers in large Japanese and non-Japanese corporations. Often the opportunity is there for new knowledge to be adopted and productively integrated into a Japanese context. However the decision making process at each level of the pyramid is so time consuming that, often by the time the final decision is reached at the top tier (2-3 years is not unusual), the ideal ‘window of opportunity’ has narrowed for many reasons. This greatly impedes the opportunity for tacit knowledge spillover here in Japan. Obviously there is the language barrier which has not diminished to any productive degree. Then there are the cultural barriers of domestic insularity and intra-corporate/institutional siloed practices. Insularity, in brief, results in a preference for the ‘wheel to be reinvented’ and domestically produced by Japanese corporations within Japan. Silo-ism results in different portions of the same company/institution working on the same technologies without any awareness of what their peers are doing. The desire for each sub-division to protect its own interests, has been a common yet clandestinely cited cause. Japan’s offshore wind development provides a convenient example of these siloed and and insular practices in action.
Various government institutions were mapping the same offshore area sites without sharing information - siloism. A large Japanese corporation underbid all the other foreign participants that could have shared expertise. An insular predilection that resulted in a further delay for Japanese OSW energy to get jumpstarted. It was deemed appropriate for almost everything to be done domestically at ‘any practical cost’ to efficiency, resulting in insufficient funding and knowledge.
In a technological world where ‘Moore’s law’ is no longer restricted to microchips, delays in technological adoption is hardly efficient for the environment or the economy. A knock-on effect may be that core researchers - already falling in number in Japan as you have indicated - can also be tempted to find more receptive terrain for their talents abroad…
Just as some of the most significant advances in medical technology are the result of war, I suspect that government funding related to the "military-industrial complex" probably helps support a lot of basic science in the U.S. As the U.S. begins to look to Japan to augment its military development and production needs, perhaps this source of funding will help spur more investment in basic science in Japan. What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
Industry concentration, Germany (although its supposedly been undergoing some amount of deindustrialization recently) still has its vibrant ecosystem of SMEs. And that *sort* of set up resembles old America when its was kicking but across many fields. And back then, at least from what I've read may times, applied-basic was very much a two way street. But this is part of the idea/policy set/even just thought experiment that is seemingly illegal: maybe decentralization, deconcertation, and diversification/heterogenization are good for science (among other things)?