A symposium recently held in Colombia, sponsored by the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, focused on commercialization of technologies. Discussions there directed my attention to the unprecedented circumstance in which the issue is placed today. "Borderlessness" seems to be the keyword for this situation. Production sites are now distributed irrespective of national borders, resulting in introduction of the most advanced technologies into developing countries. Developing countries are no longer the market or competitors of advanced countries, but act as OEM supplier to the latter. The two parties are thus bound together with a common fate. Another form of "borderlessness" is found in the field of technology: no industry can stand any longer on a single technical field. Commercialization of a technology now requires a number of different technical disciplines integrated together. This means that the education and training of engineers must change. A further example of loss of border is experienced in some actual problems, such as the question of employment in a global scale, which are not adequately addressed within a neatly defined theoretical frame. Lack of a methodology of treatment of multi-principle, multi-object problems should present us an important task for research in future.

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Manpower problems in contemporary science and engineering are reviewed and some signs of changes in the nature of the problems are discussed. Specific policy issues are classified into three levels: that of (national and policy) goals, of specific policies, and of environment. Issues on creativity development of scientific and engineering experts and its social accountability provides examples of changes in nature of the manpower problems. Practical competence and creativity are now becoming synonymous at the forefront of science and engineering. Creative entrepreneurship, as distinct from creativity in fundamental research, is needed and a new form of collective creativity attracts attention in such circumstances. On the other hand, the manpower policy will be seen in closer relationship to national goals and its social accountability will have to be assessed more closely. Myths about the manpower problem should be challenged. The paper concluded with a proposition of tasks in this field for the academic circle.

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The Science and Technology Policy Plan, approved by the Cabinet in July 1996, is an epoch-making item in the history of Japan's science and technology policy. The plan specifies that the total national R&D expenditure for the fiscal 1996-2000 will be about 17 trillion yen. The author tries to discern the trend of and tasks for Japanese science and technology policy by comparing the Policy Plan with 13 recent reports. The analysis showed that the Policy Plan included most issues presented in other reports and may be regarded as the consummation of various proposals since mid-1980s, which were triggered by criticisms of Japan's "free-riding" on basic research in other countries and unpopularity of science and technology among Japanese youth. The basic idea of the Policy Plan is to activate the R&D in the country by increasing R&D resources input and introducing more competitive platform for R&D institutions. A problem is that the Policy Plan is based on independent activities of research institutions and governmental agencies, which will end up in budget mongering without a nationally unified system of strategic planning and implementation of science and technology policy. The present circumstances also require to study policies other than the "supply-side" policy advanced in the Policy Plan.

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The "R&D-oriented" management is defined as a management policy in which the expansion and growth of a company is based on original products from its own R&D department, and tools needed by such management are presented. The management tools are based on a statistical simulation model called JSR-RDM and consist of three sets of methods and criteria: maximization of pre-tax profit, sector management, and marginal profit from product sales. The sector management means controlling three ratios of each two indices in direct proportion: sales and personnel cost; marginal profit and R&D expenditure; and pre-tax profit and material costs. Management of marginal profit aims at maintaining a certain level of the marginal profit from well-established products. It is demonstrated that, if these methods are properly used, the R&D expenditure and marginal profit of the company will continuously grow, contributing to increased revenue and expansion of business. The JSR-RDM model presents how the expansion in business scale affects sales, marginal profit, R&D expenditure and personnel and material costs. A problem of the R&D-oriented management is that contribution of cutting-edge technologies decreases as the business expands. Establishing independent management units may be an effective measure to this tendency.

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The Science and Technology Agency (STA) has been performing technology forecasts using the Delphi method approximately every five years since 1971. The survey will be continued as a basic tool for planning in Japanese R&D policy and, therefore, it is important to evaluate and improve its reliability. This is important also for international harmonization of technology forecast methods, considering that Germany and Britain have recently started similar long-term forecasts. The present work analyzes the reliability of results obtained in the newest 5th survey with particular emphasis on appropriateness of the respondents who included specialists as well as people of less expertise in relevant disciplines. It is indicated that respondent groups consisting only of experts will improve the reliability of the survey.

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RD management constitutes a strategic component of corporate management to be competitive and excel. This paper quantitatively clarifies what RD management shows better corporate performance: high growth and high profitability, in Japanese manufacturing firms. RD management here covers all levels of RD management: from corporate objectives and strategy to resource allocation and project management. This firms that have many executives specializing in RD and production in the highest decision making body in a firm show better corporate performance. So do the firms that set new product development as a corporate objective and the firms that have a primary strategy of strengthening technology potential. As for RD resources, the firms that invest more in RD per sales and the firms that have more researchers per employee show better performance. As for technology policy, the firms that place emphasis on innovative RD rather than incremental RD and on in-house technology rather than outside technology are performing better.

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A case study was made for evaluation of R&D management policies by comparing costs and contribution to the corporate performance on 100 samples of R&D activities. The strategic importance and originality of the R&D subjects were evaluated. A new R&D portfolio was developed and applied to the case study results. The "strategic" score showed high correlation with sales, and found to be a useful measure in research management. The R&D subjects which experienced increase in the "strategic" and "originality" scores received high evaluations also in the portfolio analysis. A portfolio management method was proposed in which R&D subjects are regularly assessed using the new portfolio to maintain the optimum allocation of management resources to each R&D activity.

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