When I think of "entrepreneurship", I recall my days in Silicon Valley when I stayed at Stanford University as a visiting research associate from 1980 to 1982. The technologies/products that emerged around this period have become the foundation of the internet era of today - it really was an exciting time and place to be.

After returning to Toshiba Japan, I, together with colleagues from various fields, created a concept of what is now called FPGA. However, due to the company's strategy to focus on DRAMs, we abandoned to pursue the business opportunity of FPGA. It was unfortunately a not-so-uncommon attitude to innovation during that time in Japan.

I then stayed in England in the early 90's to establish the Toshiba Cambridge Research Centre in collaboration with the University of Cambridge. The region was called Silicon Fen, which also had a culture that valued entrepreneurship.

I have developed my points of view on entrepreneurship through my experiences above, and I point out the importance of a "social innovation system" which would enable people to feel less burden when changing career.

This special issue has been organized by Prof. Takata, Kyushu University, and Prof. Kanama, Kanazawa University, collaborating on research question for the entrepreneurship education programs. Entrepreneurs have been core resources of world economic growth, and social expectation for entrepreneurship education has been increased. Recent years have faced difficulties for building up a vision on conventional way of traditional thinking. Then, we have to re-consider our situations, environments, organizations, missions and activities without catching up on the past experiences. Under such circumstances, this special issue aims at providing an academic contribution to the entrepreneurship education researches with six remarkable articles. We introduce this special issue with deep expectation for advancement of entrepreneurship education programs and development of network of entrepreneurship education leaders.

Research on entrepreneurship education has been increasingly rapidly over the past two decades. This reflects both the growing recognition that entrepreneurship drives innovation and economic growth, and the anticipation that education is effective in nurturing entrepreneurship. Although the body of literature on educating entrepreneurs is expanding, the lack of rigorous studies has been a consistent source of concern. Academic scholarship clearly has not kept up with practice. This review summarizes the outcomes of major literature reviews and meta-analysis in international peer-reviewed journals to clarify what is currently known and not known, as well as the gaps to be filled.

The methodology for new business development has been developed last decade by turning implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge and by systemizing the knowledge. Leveraging the knowledge, the approach to teach entrepreneurship is also advanced. One of such new approaches is The Lean Launchpad. Students in the Lean Launchpad are taught the latest methodology for new business development and then forced to apply the methodology in real business idea, leading to excellent educational output. It has aspects of volume production, boarder applicability, and incubating new business, resulting in broader acceptance in the world. The derivative program focusing on technology commercialization, NSF I-Corps., works as mass production machine of turning technologies into businesses. In Japan, optimizing into local environment, the authors have been running the Lean Launchpad with high impact for entrepreneurship education. The program has been also applied to enterprises that need new business, resulting in creation of variety of new business.

In this article, I showed the case study of Chalmers University of Technology (CUT) in Sweden as an example of entrepreneurship education (E.E.) program. CUT aims to bring out technology-based startups and entrepreneurs at the same time as educational goal. The E.E. by CUT focused on the technology commercialization, for that, CUT collect "ideas", which means inventions and discoveries before making them intellectual property, from universities, companies and inventors, the students try to commercialize based on their ideas. Many of NTBFs from universities are based on radical findings and inventions that realize "disruptive innovation" that destroys existing markets or creates new markets. For this reason, NTBFs from universities face higher uncertainty, it is necessary to overcome "three gaps" in technology commercialization. E. E.at CUT has designed education in a way that corresponds to these "three gaps", and as a result, it has fulfilled the diversity of human resources supply of the regional ecosystem.

Recent years have seen the rise of importance of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs and start-ups have been engines of world economic growth. Japan also has paid great attention to entrepreneurship and various policies have been discussed to enhance realization of entrepreneurship. However, there should be a lack on the discussion, which is entrepreneurial motivation of young human resources. Therefore, this article focuses on college and graduate students and investigates their motivation as entrepreneurs. The analyses show the three findings. First, the entrepreneurial disposition of Japanese students are weaker than that of U.S., China, India, Spain and Belgium. Second, Japanese students' motivations for startup business compared to other countries are weak on aspects of leadership and independence, but strong on aspects of social contribution. Third, Japanese students consider their lacks of business skills and knowledge as major risks and barriers to business startup.

Authors analyzed features and effects of university-industry collaborative education program for entrepreneurship which have been implemented from 2011 to 2016. At first, knowledge exchange among participants are the central effects in this program, and it was derived by the heterogeneity of the participating groups. In addition, it was revealed that the body of knowledge owned by the participants was reconstructed, and their way of viewing and activities were changed after that. Next, it was an important role of lecturer and facilitators to provide the infrastructure of knowledge exchange among participants with the variety of background. Furthermore, it was also important for lecturer and facilitators to function as intermediaries for facilitating participants' communication in group exercises. Finally, a factor that the participants kept their motivation so high during the program period was brought by the environment peculiar to this program, that is two-week concentration and isolated from participants' daily life.

We calculate the labor force participation rate using "Japan Doctoral Human Resource Profiling". The rate of female doctor under 35 years old is 95.8%, which is remarkably higher than general college graduates and above. However, the career development would not be favorable, because the rate of the female doctoral candidate to actually get a doctoral degree is about 5 points lower than male and the female non-regular employment rate is higher than male. Having investigated the influence of the family formation on the rate of getting the degree, it was estimated that the rate of getting the degree fell down in the case of the woman who has a child.

In addition, when the regular employment rate was taken as the dependent variable, a negative coefficient was estimated for both married women and women who have children in cases where employers were universities and private enterprises.

The "Delphi" related methods fostered the development of multiple survey practices. However, their mathematical theoretical validity and prediction accuracy have not been investigated in depth, especially from the perspective of mathematical or qualitative method.

In this paper, we run virtual subject experiment with agent-based simulations to verify the validity of the information obtained from two methods: a Delphi survey for a repeated questionnaire and a real-time Delphi method aimed to present the response status when a systematic information feedback is implemented according to predefined conditions /protocols.

In the results, the Delphi method emerges as a way to consolidate opinions and make them converge. On the contrary, the degree of consolidation/convergence ensured by the real-time Delphi method varies greatly across multiple simulations, even within the same respondents' group. Moreover, this method cannot be validated theoretically with respect to the statistical group response, as the basic Delphi principle is not satisfied.

In this paper, from the 2 cases of Aichi Steel Co., Ltd., we propose the hypothesis of innovation process by clarifying the evolution of two products and related technologies. Prior research on the steel industry in Japan, often discusses improvement and innovation in manufacturing methods and production control. Most studies are directed to major steelmakers, and there is a lack of research on special steel manufacturers which develop new products.

Our research question is how special steel manufactures develop technologies and products that contribute to de-maturation. Our cases show they made a pursuit of core business when it leaps to a different field. At the same time, it incorporated the needs of new markets and successfully explored technologies from outside the organization to new product development. As a result, they have developed a mechanism to leap to different fields by proactively searching outside the company. This mechanism based on the trend of electronicization of the automobile industry.

This paper conducted a quantitative analysis on the period of maintenance of the breeder's right and examined the possibility of use it as economic value evaluation index. The following two hypotheses were verified by the Kaplan Meier method and the discrete time logit model.

1) Since breeder's right is low in registration fee, right holders continue to maintain their rights until the expiration date of the duration specified by the law

2) If the right holders abandon the right before the expiration date, the tendency varies depending on the type of agricultural products and the attributes of the right holder

In the present study, the right holders judge maintaining the right or not based on the registration fee every year. Also, it is revealed that the difference between the type of agricultural products and the right holder attribute has an influence on the period of maintaining right.