The activity of a person depends on the quantity of his or her relevant knowledge and resources. Tacit knowledge, accumulated through his/her experience, is particularly decisive for understanding the purpose, interpreting data, evaluating circumstance and deciding action. The Japanese, while possessing a plenty of explicit knowledge acquired in a passive manner, have significantly lost their tacit knowledge because of the facile modern lifestyle and decreased opportunities of playing in childhood which constitutes primordial experiences for the personality. The results are poorer physical and mental capacities, the latter including communication with others, sensibility, and evaluation of things, phenomena and information. This is a serious drawback to innovation that is a prerequisite for survival of a developed country. We need, therefore, a social system that enriches primordial experiences in childhood and provides their equivalents for adults, which should be important sources of innovative ideas and skills for their development.

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Implementation of various evaluation activities has been accompanied by fostering public research and innovation. This paper aims at describing characteristics and addressing challenges of evaluation system for research and innovation conducted in the public sector and on the basis of public funds in Japan. It explains the current legal framework for the R & D and innovation evaluation system. It elucidates that the Japanese public R & D and innovation evaluation system, getting out of the introductory phase, is pluralistic and stratified. It also points out that the evaluations for improvement of the quality of R & D from a long-term perspective have not been developed yet while those based on legal obligations or related to the survival and continuation of public research institutions have been prioritized. It furthermore mentions that the revised general guidelines for national R & D evaluation have still several issues. Then, it introduces the recommendations submitted by a working group for reforming the evaluation system. Finally, it provides normative suggestions, including articulation of evaluation and clarification and rearrangement of purposes, layers and objectives of evaluations, for a prospective framework of the evaluation system.

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Although the national evaluation of university research has been institutionalized since the 1980s in some countries, these systems are now plagued with controversies and are undergoing reforms. These changes necessitate not only methodological modifications but also a re-thinking of the role of university research evaluation in the new form of governance of science that includes multi-relationships between government ministries, universities, industries, and other stakeholders. In this paper, we first observe the recent changes in the evaluation system in the U.K., Australia, the Netherlands, and Japan, and then discuss the focus of the controversies destabilizing the evaluation systems during each stage of planning: (1) prioritizing the objectives of evaluation to reduce work load, (2) setting the scope and unit of object to be evaluated for maximizing the cost-effectiveness of evaluation, (3) expanding the model of university research to include the socio-economic effects of university research, (4) deciding upon the reference points of valuation (comparative evaluation vs. absolute evaluation), and (5) making a choice with regard to the measurement methods (peer-review vs. metrics). These points should be discussed explicitly among the stakeholders to stabilize the evaluation system.

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Improvement and accountability are important viewpoints in evaluation of universities. Satisfying the two requirements is, however, very difficult, because of structural problems in the university system itself, and of the poorly constructed management cycle in universities. Strong leadership of a president, effective monitoring system for institutional activity, and clearly defined authority/responsibility structure are prerequisites for establishing an effective management cycle.

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Creative criticism and discussion are factors indispensable for advances in scientific research. As discussions and mutual criticism in conferences and workshops stimulate individual researchers, external evaluation provides research organizations or their constituent units with similar opportunities. External evaluation may be regarded as a form of creative criticism which helps universities and research institutes reexamine their strategies in selecting research subjects, providing means for promoting research activities and support systems, and thus prompting the organizations to succeed as centers of excellence of international status. It is desirable for the evaluating and evaluated parties to exchange their best practices, which will catalyze creative activities and improve the performance of the research community as a whole.

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This paper tries a meta-evaluation of national R & D in Japan, and discusses the issues, based on only the information available in public, for the two cases that the author was involved in as a principal investigator and a reviewer. Those two cases indicate that national R & D has not always been evaluated in a transparent or fair manner. Further, these analyses show that the evaluation of national R & D is rather "backward-looking," and little feedback is provided to the investigators. The case studies never indicate that the Council of Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) neglected its duties. Rather, it would be fair to assume that CSTP is absolutely serious when it comes to the evaluation of national R & D given the intense pressure it works in. However, the case studies show that CSTP is too focused on specific projects, particularly on large-scale R & D projects, and its reviews are somewhat chaotic. Further, it seems that CSTP has not considered the governance of evaluation, except for the discussions held during the review of the National R & D Evaluation Guidelines. The author presumes that under the current resource, CSTP is more focused on specific R & D projects. This paper suggests that CSTP should narrow the range of R & D project evaluation and increase its efforts with regard to the governance of evaluation.

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Among public research sectors carrying out industrial technology research (public research institutes, organization in university etc.,), typical cases are found which have positioning corresponding to firms' research stages (early stage technology, core stage technology, product and practical technology). As those typical cases, BSAC (early stage technology research-type) in UC Berkeley, IMEC (core stage technology research-type) in Belgium, Fraunhofer Society (product and practical technology research-type) in Germany are selected, and Max Planck Society in Germany is selected as science research-type. By comparing these four cases, effect of the positioning (type) in research stages of public research sectors on the research system, the collaboration system with private firms, and the resulting performance are analyzed. As the positioning (type) changes from science to product and practical technology, the research system follows the change, and the collaboration system with private firms becomes more individual to firms. With the positioning change, the academic paper number performance (academic paper number/total revenue) monotonously decreases. But, no simple correlation is found between the positioning change and the industry fund performance (industry fund/total revenue) or the licensing income performance (licensing income/total revenue). A moderate correlation is found that as the industry fund performance increases, the academic-paper-number performance decreases for eight representative public research sectors. On the basis of these analyses, implications are given for Japanese public research sectors focusing on industry technology: 1) adjustment with research in private firms and introduction of their research fund are important, 2) selecting adequate collaboration type is important on collaboration with private firms, 3) as for evaluation indicators of public research sectors, indicators representing the strength of collaboration with private firms such as total amount of research fund from private firms should be set in addition to those representing the research activity of public research sector such as total number of academic paper.

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After 1990's, technology foresight has been conducted by many countries of OECD members, Asia and South America. These countries have developed the methodologies of technology foresight by their own aspects to meet their original social and political needs. Aiming to obtain an overview of technology foresight, this paper examines objective, methodology and subject area of technology foresight in the world. The objective of technology foresight is not only to contribute to science and technology and innovation strategy planning, but also to establish a knowledge base related to science and technology and innovation strategy as a learning tool. Furthermore, a bibliometric analysis of Delphi method, scenario-planning and technology roadmapping has found that the numbers of publications of each methodology have increased, and these subject areas are different by methodology such as health and medicine for Delphi method, environment and energy for scenario-planning, and electricity and semiconductor for technology roadmapping.

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