After a prolonged activity in technology management in a large company, I moved in Summer 1999 to one of its subsidiaries, a time-honored power tool manufacturer, to assume the presidency, which meant to me switching from technology management to corporate management. The company was then in a critical situation, because of the unprofitable operation of an American printer manufacturer purchased in 1990 (towards the end of the "bubble economy" of Japan) on the one hand, and financial difficulty of the power tool business due to sluggish restructuring on the other. The deficit was threatening the company's traditional financial soundness. While I finally managed to solve these problems, I realized the value of hit products for an enterprise, and recognized the importance of technology management. Prospective technology managers are strongly recommended to study corporate management thoroughly : it will help them understand the importance of technology management and prepare them for possible entrepreneurship in new ventures. I hope more technology managers succeed in corporate management, which will be an effective step to influencial leaders.

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Reforms in government agencies, including creation of the Cabinet Office and reorganizations in agencies, the Information Disclosure Law, and introduction of the all-government policy evaluation system, all realized in 2001, have a potential impact on the administration of Japan. The all-government policy evaluation system was prepared on the basis of the final report of the Administration Reform Council, and implemented in January 2001. Standard guidelines for the system were established, and the general framework of the system provided by the guidelines was translated into the Policy Evaluation Law. The guidelines define the purpose, concept and scope of evaluation; bodies executing evaluation ; timing of evaluation ; necessity, efficiency, effectiveness, equality and priority as the evaluation criteria ; and project, output and general evaluation as the evaluation approaches. The guidelines also require the government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications, to make their policies reflect evaluation results, publish evaluation results, and establish practical guidelines for implementation of policy evaluation. The Policy Evaluation Law also stipulates establishment of a basic policy of the Government on policy evaluation, master plans and annual schedules for agencies. The effectiveness of the system depends on appropriate implementation of policy evaluation and proper use of its results. This will be realized more easily by adopting generally accepted evaluation methods and improving them gradually, rather than by imposing uniformly a sophisticated and exacting method.

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The Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, acting as the R&D center for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) employed in the fiscal 1999 a rating method on an experimental basis in the evaluation process of the 39 R&D projects conducted by the Industrial Technology Council's Evaluation Committee. The method involved five to over ten evaluators for each project who ranked the corresponding project by a rating from 1 to 5. The results suggested program revisions or detailed scrutiny in planning for the subsequent period for those projects gained ratings lower than m - σ (m is the average rating and σ the standard deviation). It also indicated a tendency for R&D fostering germinal technologies to have inappropriate targets, planning and management which obscures the prospect of the projects. These conclusions show clearly the importance of defining project targets in terms of commercial potentiality at the earliest stage of the planning. Evaluators with backgrounds of the field where the project is executed tended to give higher ratings to the project in question than non-specialists including those representing potential users of the technology. The discrepancy was more marked in appreciation of the R&D outcome and its commercial value as well as spillover effects.

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The paper presents results of the survey on institution evaluation methods conducted in the fiscal 2000 by Mitsubishi Research Institute for the Technology Evaluation Section of the MITI's Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (now the Technology Evaluation Research Section, Industrial Science and Technology Policy and Environment Bureau, METI). It also discusses requirements for evaluation of R&D institutions that provides public support of R&D activities and its implementation. The discussion covers not only the organizations conducting R&D as their own activity (national laboratories, independent administrative corporations), but also R&D managing institutions (public service corporations, special public corporations), and discusses their differences. Institution evaluation should serve as an important stimulation for the evolution of relevant institutions. As such, it should be conducted regularly based on the performance of the institutions resulting from their activities according to the mid- and long-range planning. To do so, the institutions should accumulate data to be provided for evaluation as a part of their management activities. Five broad evaluation criteria are proposed which will fit an evaluation system integrated into the institution management cycle, taking into account the relationships of the function of the institutes and the aspects to be evaluated. An exemplary scenario is presented which illustrates how institution evaluation is conducted in accordance with a mid-range planning.

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Research evaluation in the Japanese science and technology field is discussed from the author's point of view on avoidance of possible confusion due to early legislation, prevention of barren formality, and improvement of efficacy. Aspects of research evaluation are categorized into basics and more specific issues : the former includes the framework and structure of the evaluation system, related issues, scientific basis of evaluation, and the management of evaluation in the scientific community ; the latter is concerned to further development of evaluation theory, finding the outcomes, improvement in survey and analysis techniques, difficulties associated with exante evaluation, and the evaluation of the evaluation policy itself. These problems are reviewed in the perspective of the present situation in Japan.

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The core and the non-core technology fields for each industry were identified. Then, R&D activities of the Japanese firms were analyzed at industry level using the matrix data sets of R&D expenditure and patent application on the core / non-core framework. The result suggests that the patent application should be the same input indicator as R&D expenditure of the R&D activity in the case for core technology field of high-tech industry. This relation is explained using the novel R&D model and through the case studies.

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R&D diversification strategy is an integral part of overall corporate diversification strategy and plays an important role in shaping the technology structure of an enterprise. However, the recent stagnation in productivity in Japan demonstrates the significance of the effective R&D diversification strategies. It could be hypothesized that while homogeneous technology structure contributes shortterm efficiency, it is fragile to the changes in the external environment. In this paper, we analyze 13 sectors in Japan's manufacturing industry and their transition of technology structures based on R&D diversification patterns over the period 1970-1997. The results demonstrate that technology structure of the manufacturing industries indicates homogenized characteristics in their R&D diversification patterns. In order to analyze the effect on change in productivity of technology structure, total factor productivity (TFP) was decomposed into direct effect of the technology, indirect effect of the technology, effect of the spillover benefit of the technology, and effect of the change in final demand. In addition, a model which introduced analysis of the technology spillover using the assimilation coefficient, was attempted. The result of the analysis demonstrates that excessive diversification of industry 〓 s technology structure proved homogeneous characteristics that in turn had adverse effect in the productivity.

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Since many companies have introduced cashflow-based performance valuation methods such as economic profit, R&D managers are required to have methodology to evaluate the cashflow-based performance of their R&D investment. The economic profit rate has a higher correlation coefficient with operation incomes over R&D expenditures than with R&D expenditures over sales. In high-technology intensive business, there is a linear relation between the economic profit rate and the operation income over R&D expenditure. In order to articulate multiyear effects of R&D investment, the Performance-Scale Chart Method is convenient to evaluate the possible time lag between the points of R&D investment and the points of outcome performance from it. Finally, spinout ventures from corporations are effective vehicles to increase the R&D performance by transforming non-core technology seeds into real options for future deals. Corporations can delay the rational decisions of deal structures after seeing success of them.

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The high technology miracle in Japan can be attributed to a virtuous cycle between technology and economic development. This virtuous cycle is supported by institutional elasticity for technological innovation and diffusion. Such elasticity has been a typically observed relationship between wage increases and productivity improvement : wage elasticity to productivity improvement under the Japanese employment system. However, under a new paradigm in the 1990s, corresponding to the bursting of the bubble economy along with low or negative economic growth and an aging trend, the foregoing virtuous cycle is feared to succumb to a vicious cycle. This is considered due to a loosening institutional elasticity under the new paradigm. Understanding that this elasticity can be observed typically in the "productivity standard principle" in Japan's employment system which maintains sustainable growth without information by keeping a dynamic balance between wage increase and productivity improvement, this paper attempts to demonstrate this hypothetical view focusing on a comparison between the 1980s and the 1990s. Intensive analysis demonstrated that institutional elasticity for technological innovation and diffusion has been deteriorating. This process was observed by destruction of those factors which enable maintenance of sustainable growth by keeping a dynamic balance between wage increases and productivity improvement. As an additional consequence of the substantial reaction of Japan's employment system to rapid advances in information technology (IT) and the aging trend, it was identified that such lower elasticity is due to a delay of technology, particularly information technology into labor, leading to an increasing mismatch between labor and capital which in decreasing technology substitution for labor.

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By focusing on scoring method that is used to evaluate R&D projects, this paper seeks to specify empirically the factors that discriminate successful projects from failed projects in the Japanese chemical industry. Our statistical analysis revealed that when projects are evaluated in this industry, three factors, marketability, technology, and synergistic potential, tend to be valued by practitioners approximately in a 3 : 2 : 1 ratio. Although the project evaluations in this research were conducted ex-post, the findings suggest that the results may also be applicable in the project selection stage. Based on our findings, we propose a Continuous Improvement Scoring Method (CISM) that contains continuous improvement cycles and links ex-ante project selection with ex-post project evaluation.

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This paper looks at the factors contributing to success in advanced scientific research with reference to the historic development of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with atomic resolution. Investigations are based on papers and lectures by G. Binnig and H. Rohrer, the Nobel winners who invented STM, and by R. D. Young, the precursor who devised "Topografiner," a type of scanning fieldemission microscope similar to STM, but missed the epoch-making invention which he had almost attained. Factors are found to be "unprejudiced free thinking," "exploration into new concepts," "clear target," "willingness to try the unknown" and "unyielding spirit," "magnanimity enough to grant elbowroom for researchers to dream, to explore, and to make and correct mistakes," "good research manager(s)" and "superior technical support."

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To reveal how much the Japanese patents depend upon scientific knowledge, we constructed an original Japanese patent database and analyzed science linkage in samples of patents, which have been patented and published since 1993 till 1999, in the field of genetic technology. We found that, in Japan, patents in the field of genetic technology have much stronger science linkage than other patents do. Also, we found that Japanese patents have numerous citations. In addition, unlike the US patents, most Japanese patent citations are embedded in the main body of application text and they are not standardized. To pursue farther research, the need for creation of latest search program, which extracts citations and standardize them from crude Japanese patent database, became apparent.

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An activation method for developing R&D ideas is proposed. The essence of the method is that the value of an idea increases as it is passed around and commented on. Agency theory was used to investigate the relation between those proposing ideas and those commenting on them. A model was then developed in which rewarding comments increases the value of an idea. Numerical simulations showed that rewarding comments increases the number of high value ideas as well as some effects of a comment-reward system.

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In Japan, efforts are being made to promote commercialization of research results from universities. But the co-operation between universities and industry is not active enough and universities are not fully performing their functions. In Germany, there are not a sufficient number of systematic support systems as in the United States. But research co-operation with industry and establishment of venture businesses are being promoted by putting in place an environment that makes it easy receive research funds from outside and authorizing a system in which faculties are engaged in voluntary co-operation with industry. This paper examines industry-university co-operation system in Germany and also discusses the policy measure of universities' contribution to society by helping to create new industries in Japan.

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