The research on national innovation systems have found reasons for which the institutional structures related to innovation processes in different countries did, in contrast with the general trends to economic globalization, not converge but maintained their individualities. This approach has, however, faced new challenges every time the globalization enters into a different phase, such as the rapid spread of ICT in the 90s. Analysis of the globalization of innovation-related activities requires studies on the international flow of knowledge or ideas. A useful approach to this task widely practiced is to analyze the international mobility of researcher and the international collaborative research by business companies. This has already generated some significant results.

This study reviews previous studies on international collaborative research (ICR) to obtain suggestions for promoting successful ICR in Japan. Japanese ICR is less active than that of other advanced economies, and policies for promoting Japanese ICR are being planned. Based on the findings of previous studies, the following is discussed: the background of increasing ICR in the world, the benefits and costs of ICR, the motivation and opportunities for forming international research teams, the possible reasons for inactive ICR in Japan, and the conditions for successful ICR. The importance of the international mobility of researchers for forming international research teams and successfully performing ICR is pointed out, and then policies are suggested for supporting international mobility, the utilization of human capital and the social capital of migrants. Policies to improve the research environment within the country are also important for achieving ICR at higher levels.

Research activities in the world show a rapid expansion. In addition to this, the interlinkages among different countries/regions are getting stronger and denser over time. This paper gives an overview of the situation of international collaborations based on bibliometric analyses and on analyses of surveys to authors of scientific papers in Japan and the United States. Bibliometric analyses show the trend of international co-authorship in major countries, the trend of international co-authorship by field of science, quality of internationally co-authored papers, and changes of Japan's position in the international research network. We also discuss the relation between the diversity of research and international co-authorship. Next, based on the surveys to authors of scientific papers in Japan and the United States, we discuss the participation of foreign-born researchers in a research team, the relation between the internationalization and the participation of postdoctoral fellows in a research team, and the relation between the internationalization of a research team and the motivation of research.

A robot nowadays cannot be developed by only one roboticist because very high expertise with technologies related to robotics is required to do it such as computational mechanics, artificial intelligence, semiconductor engineering, control engineering and/or sensor engineering, etc. This situation eventually makes roboticists to do their researches in collaborative way including international ones. In this article, the author describes the basic structure of collaboration researches in robotics showing examples obtained from his international research experiences. Firstly the special features of robotics or even engineering in generalized sense are described by showing the structural and purposive differences between SCIENCE and ENGINEERING, then he emphasizes that MODELING is the most important process in the stream of engineering processes. After that, the following processes, MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION and SOLUTION, and DESIGN, EXPERIMET and FEEDBACK are described with their structures, purposes and examples. Finally, the author introduces internal collaborations in relation to the structures and the points of those processes.

Recently, multi-disciplinary approach and collaboration between individual laboratories have been becoming increasingly important in the biomedical research field. This trend is supposedly related to the recent technological advancements and the emerging important roles of bioengineering, bioinformatics and biophysics in the biomedical science. In this article, several aspects of collaboration in the United States, including various efforts to promote collaboration, and those of US-Japan international collaboration are described from a point of view of a Japanese biomedical researcher who has worked in the US over 20 years. Along with the globalization, the diplomatic value of international scientific collaboration is highly recognized by the governments of many countries, including US and Japan. On the other hand, the visibility of Japanese contributions to the global biomedical science appears to be relatively decreasing these years. Moreover, possible unintended consequences of increased connectivity in the global research community and peer-review system are also discussed.

According to the former research which our team have reported, we have discussed the university's risk management which should have been in force to break down the risks existing in the international research collaboration, with reference to the U.S University's practices, to "the risks to affect financial losses" and "the risks to affect university's reputation". However, it is necessary in addition for the university to widely take actions to the risk management to synchronize with the rapid change of their circumstances, also required holistic approach as the enterprise risk management as well as the crisis management in order to encourage their global research collaborations and activities. In this research, we consider the risk management to illustrate the issues in our cases from our viewpoint of research promotion.

Science and Technology has no boarder in itself, and international cooperation including collaborative researches has been promoted for maximize of its research outcomes. Furthermore, science and technology has been used as a bargaining chip in the recent years. At this moment, internationalization of research development in Japan is way behind. The 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan that will be implemented in 2016 indicate the enforcement on Science and Technology Diplomacy and national interest. In this report, the policy, history, current situation and future perspectives of this international collaboration in view of S&T Diplomacy are introduced.

This paper overviews today's status of university research administrators (URAs) in Japan and provides a conceptual framework of their roles to promote a comprehension of diversity of URAs. Firstly, we investigated multifarious backgrounds of demands for URAs. Secondly, we confirmed diversified roles of current URAs from a review of a nation-wide questionnaire inquiry and an original survey of recruit documents. These examinations reveal such diversity follows organizational demands and major universities request URAs to be multifunctional professionals. To this end, we provided a model of acquisition and utilization of research resources and illustrated relationship between the model and functions of URAs. Our framework will aid to understand the difference of their functions among universities and to design appropriate mandates of URAs.

The Tsukuba Innovation Arena (TIA-nano) was established as an "innovation platform" by public research institutes (PRI) and firms for joint nanotechnology R&D activities. It is a virtual network comprised of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and other PRIs in the Tsukuba area. In this study, the activities of AIST in two specific technology areas—carbon nanotubes (CNT) and power electronics (SiC devices)—are chosen from various research areas under the framework of TIA-nano, in order to draw policy implications for project management of industrial collaborations. We found that (1) AIST has collaborated increasingly more with firms particularly after its incorporation in 2002, and (2) its role as an innovation platform is different between CNT and SiC in that it is important to proceed with CNT projects for firms by using open intellectual property policies, while for SiC projects, a vertical coordination role is more important.