The Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation (CSTI) requires high-quality evidence to effectively function as the government's central coordinating body. To aid in its strategic planning and allocation of resources, CSTI has formed a specialized team and developed the e-CSTI system. This system includes a comprehensive database designed to analyze the distribution of the national budget, university operating costs, competitive funding, and the correlation between researcher productivity and outputs like academic papers and patents. Additionally, e-CSTI facilitates the identification of priority areas through detailed analysis of research outcomes, funding allocation, and expert assessments. The 6th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan has introduced a proposal for creating a Think Tank dedicated to Safety and Security, and preparations for its establishment are currently underway. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone involved for their significant contributions to the development of e-CSTI.

The special issue focuses on evidence based policy making (EBPM) in Science, technology and innovation policy. The EBPM has difficulties because it takes long times from policy implementations to appearance of their effects., and the paths are affected by various factors. This special issue consists of overviews of current state, case studies and outlooks for the future on EBPM in science, technology and innovation policy by policy makers and researchers.

Evidence-based policy making (EBPM) in Science, technology and innovation policy is difficult because it takes a long time for the effects of the policy to appear, and the process is complex and related with various factors.

The EBPM is supported by various forms of policy-research institutes and programs from industry, academia, and government. In this paper the current status of EBPM is summarized according to each policy issue: fundamental statistics and surveys, frameworks and decision-making processes, indicators of research capabilities, research environment, research expenses and fundings, human resources development and international brain circulation, open science, private R&D and innovation, industry-academia-government collaboration, ventures and regional development, analysis of priority research areas and emerging research fields, and ELSI, STS and Science Communication.

Finally, I will discuss future issues from the perspectives of the relationship between policymakers and policy researchers, human resource development, and making theory and models.

The analysis of priority areas in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (STI Policy) has gained prominence recently. This interest is driven by increased global competition in scientific research, attention to emerging and convergent fields, societal challenges, and changes in international economic security. The concept of priority areas is not new, evolving since the inception of science and technology policy. Advances in data availability and processing have allowed for more detailed analysis, leading to finer granularity in defining these areas. Methods employing bibliometrics for domain comprehension are now utilized in STI policy development. These involve assessing research paper proximity and clustering based on overall closeness. Domains are evaluated for growth potential and economic security importance, including material and supply chain considerations. The progression of priority area analysis is expected to enhance STI policy formulation significantly.

Cybersecurity covers a wide range of areas including networking, software, hardware, cryptography, authentication, and cyberattack countermeasures. On the other hand, few cybersecurity experts are well familiar with all areas of cybersecurity. So, evidence-based analysis, such as the number of papers and patent families, is very important to understand the trends in the cybersecurity field without bias. However, few cybersecurity analyses are conducted in terms of both research papers and patent literature. In this paper, we focus on cybersecurity as a specialized field and conduct a detailed analysis of trends in the field of cybersecurity using e-CSTI, a research field analysis tool developed by the Japanese Cabinet Office, and Elsevier's bibliography. Specifically, we extract two representative clusters in the field of cybersecurity (cryptography and cyberattack countermeasures), clarify the structure of each paper cluster and patent cluster, and analyze the research trends and trends of hot topics in each country around the world at the cluster level.

Recent university reform policies, such as the University for International Research Excellence and the Program for Promoting the Enhancement of Research Universities with a Regional Core and Distinctive Characteristics, aim to allocate large amounts of funds to some universities on the condition that they formulate strategies for university reform and thereby develop the research capacity of the country as a whole. However university reform policies have not been sufficiently evaluated in terms of how effective the programs are at the national level, although project evaluations of selected universities have been conducted. This paper examines the framework for evaluation and monitoring of programs for regional research universities as a case study. After pointing out the need to clarify the logic by which allocating funds to a small number of universities can lead to structural changes in the national research and innovation system and have an impact on the country as a whole, the paper examines the challenge of evaluation for each of the following types of univesities: research-intensive universities with networks of excellence, entrepreneurial universities in a glocal innovation ecosystem, transformative universities in local transformative innovation.

The Japanese government has strongly promoted EBPM in recent years, and related activities have shown progress in each ministry. In reality, however, diverse kinds of evidence have already been used in varied forms in each policy sector. While some multi-sectoral studies on EBPM have been conducted, they have set no framework for cross-sectoral comparison, leaving the overall picture of challenges for EBPM unclear. To address this gap, the authors have conducted a cross-sectoral study on the current status and challenges of EBPM in Japan from a practical perspective, utilizing the conceptual framework of the Science-Policy Interface (SPI). This study, dealing with 12 policy fields, has identified 6 categories of general challenges for EBPM in Japan. Based on such findings, this paper discusses the current status and challenges of EBPM in the Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) sector, comparing them with those of other sectors.

Introducing areas of research interest (ARIs) in the UK and learning agendas in the US and analyzing pilot practices for agenda setting and policymaking at SciREX Center and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), this paper looks at the potential for new evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) in Japan. The SciREX project implemented ARI on a trial basis in FY2022 to serve as a reference for programme design in the third phase (FY2023-2025) of the Co-evolution Realisation Programme. Based on this experience and findings, the authors designed and conducted a series of workshops to examine policy questions that should be considered in the medium and long term for MEXT. Both practices primarily aim to find "just-fit" policy issues and research questions for the current organizational and institutional framework, but they also suggest possible prescriptions for approaching more essential issues and overcoming the limitations of existing EBPM.

In this paper, we propose a method to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of excellent researchers from the viewpoints of diversity of research fields and affiliated institutions in each research field. We extracted the major highly cited researchers with the top 1% of highly cited papers in each field from 19,536,453 literatures published from 2008 to 2016. Among them, we selected excellent researchers (Star Scientists: SS) who have a significantly large number of highly cited papers. Then, we analyzed the characteristics of SS in each research field using the indicators of field diversity and institution diversity proposed in this paper. As a result, we verified that the diversity of the excellent researchers is higher than that of the other researchers. In addition, it is found that the field diversity of SS in the fields such as materials science and chemistry is higher than that in other fields. Accordingly, the method proposed in this paper can be used as one of the effective methods for analyzing the field diversity and institution diversity of researchers in making science, technology and innovation policies.

Comparing the diffusion speed of smartphones by age group, the diffusion speed of those in their 60s was about three times slower than that of those in their 20s. To investigate the cause of this difference, this paper reproduced the smartphone diffusion curve using ABM simulation. The reproduced simulation results confirm that the small number of friends is the main factor that slows down the diffusion speed. Previous studies have pointed out various factors that affect diffusion speed, and there have been divergent views. In contrast, this paper visually presents the impact of the number of friends on the diffusion speed by analyzing under a uniform set of conditions. Furthermore, this paper infers from the results that the primary decision-making methods relied upon when deciding on the adoption of innovations may be different between the young and the elderly.

Entrepreneurship education programs in higher education have grown significantly in recent decades, reflecting an increasing recognition of their potential impact. These programs aim to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills that foster creativity and innovation, which are critical for students' professional growth and future impact on society. Considering the complexities in cultivating these qualities, there is a need for higher education institutions to provide effective faculty development (FD) programs that are closely aligned with the goals of entrepreneurship education. In response, this research introduces an evidence-based framework to evaluate the effectiveness of FD programs in achieving these objectives. Our study involved 41 participants, assessed three times throughout the program. The results showed improvements in two learning outcomes related to creativity processes, with the notable influence of three important individual differences on the development of these outcomes. Additionally, the elective course was found to enhance one of the learning outcomes.

In recent years, there has been a growing number of innovation studies using patent data, not only in economics but also in management field. This time we would like to introduce the title of this book, "Patents, Citations, and Innovations: A Window on the Knowledge Economy," by Jaffe and Trajtenberg published in 2002. This book is considered to be the whistling arrow that launched several strands of innovation studies using patent data. The impact of this book on the academia has been enormous, both quantitatively and qualitatively.