Our most recent experience with the almost instantaneous spread of ChatGPT around the world, which become an unprecedented social phenomenon, reveals the potential of emerging technologies to generate benefits as well as unpredictable risks through their use, while how profoundly they will be impacting our society remains to be discovered.

The key question here is "How to guide emerging technologies and innovation to better shape our future society? To address this challenge, this paper emphasizes the need for multi-disciplinary approaches, and advocates for co-creation of innovation with researchers in humanities and social sciences.

To move ahead in this direction, referring to the experience of the Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence and Human Society (Cabinet Office), the paper suggests to start with a multi-stakeholder dialogue in view of creating collective intelligence.

In innovation creation, most discussions and projects have been led by technological development based on natural science research. However, this special issue is concerned with the possibility that innovation is also driven and created by the wisdom of social sciences and humanities (SSH) research. SSH research is extremely important in tackling "wicked" problems embedded in complex social systems, and in developing innovations to solve such problems.

The structure of this special issue is as follows:

First, the role and function of the University Research Administrator (URA) as a supportive function for innovation created by SSH research is discussed.

Next, we discuss transformative innovation policy as a theoretical background.

Then, actual research cases in economics, citizen science, humanities, and industrial-academic collaborations are presented.

Finally, as an advanced case study, a discussion of the support provided by the U.K. government and the U.K. academic research community is presented.

This paper is jointly written by URAs (University Research Administrators) working in the area of social sciences and humanities (SSH) at universities in Japan. First, an overview is given of Japan's current innovation policy and the functions and roles of URAs. Next, we describe case studies and the roles of URAs at four universities (Kyoto University, University of Tsukuba, Osaka University, and Waseda University.) Finally, a summary is provided regarding the four cases and the roles and functions of URAs. It was found that URAs go beyond mere research support and are more actively involved in innovation creation. The roles and functions of URAs are summarized in terms of the concept of "change agents." These are "people who intentionally try to bring about change or innovation in their organizations. It was indicated that URAs carry out three main functions: "catalysts," "process helper" and "resource linker."

Transformative innovation policy focuses on facilitating societal transformation by incorporating diverse actors and novel social practices. This normative turn in innovation policy is conceptually in sync with the long-term, cross-cutting, and fundamental transformation processes such as sustainability transitions and deep transitions. Note that whereas "transition" focuses on the process of how to change socio-technical systems, "transformation" focuses on the direction of change itself and what are the emergent patterns of change. The latter emphasizes the participation and relationships of a wider range of actors, including non-human actors, as well as the motivations and values of individuals. What is required here is not only systemic reflexivity, such as monitoring and evaluation, but also individual reflexivity, in which actors themselves change their perceptions, attitudes and actions, and thereby researchers in social sciences and humanities are expected to transform themselves into proactive players in creating innovation.

We conducted economic research on carbon pricing to achieve the 80 percent Greenhouse Gas emission reduction from the Japanese economy by 2050 with the financial support from Environment Research and Technology Development Fund of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan (JPMEERF20202008). We found that regional emissions trading schemes in Japan led to the spillover effects, i.e. the CO₂ emission reduction in facilities outside of the regulated areas. We also found that there is more diffusion of energy-saving technologies in buildings in Tokyo compared to other regions without ETS. These findings are examples of innovations towards solving climate change issues. We note that we faced difficulties in analyzing micro data because matching facility level data to the firm was not straightforward. Moreover, measuring innovation was not an easy task. However, we argue that social scientists such as economists can contribute to the promotion of innovation toward climate change.

Plastic pollution is a complex environmental problem with far-reaching consequences for ecosystems and society. The humanities and social sciences can play a vital role in addressing the problem of plastic pollution. These fields of study can help us to understand the causes of plastic pollution, the social and economic costs of the problem, and the potential solutions. They can also help us to develop new approaches to raising awareness about plastic pollution, changing human behavior, and creating new social structures that can help to reduce plastic waste. Citizen science is a collaborative effort between scientists and the public to collect data and solve environmental problems. Citizen science projects can help to raise awareness about plastic pollution, collect data on the distribution and abundance of plastic pollution, and develop new solutions to the problem.

Until recently, this author has been conducting "unexplored research" on rare and old manuscripts from the Himalayan region but has had little contact with society and has not been able to benefit society at large. It was thus "novel but seemingly useless unexplored research." However, through various efforts, he found that, depending on peculiar circumstances, the "novel but seemingly useless unexplored research" could be transformed into "novel and useful unexplored research" according to the following three ways:

(1) passively waiting for a change in the world situation to increase its value;

(2) actively promoting the product to increase its public recognition and interest; and

(3) creating impactful products and services by integrating science and technology.

This paper introduces a mechanism for enhancing the significance of unexplored research in the humanities and examples of R&D that integrate the humanities and sciences, such as a Buddhist chatbot (BuddhaBot) and a Buddhist metaverse (Teraverse).

The Hitachi Kyoto University Laboratory is a joint research laboratory for the collaborative research among natural sciences, humanities and sociology. Under the comprehensive theme of "Exploration of basics and theory based on understanding of homo sapiens and culture", we are promoting two sub themes: "Social issues in 2050 and social value propositions of universities and companies to solve these issues" and "Social systems that learn from humans and culture". Underlying these themes is the idea that we should explore "social issues arise because homo sapiens are humans," that is, humans are not rational creatures. This paper provides an overview of the Hitachi Kyoto University Laboratory, then looks back at the specific activities of the laboratory in relation to the typology of industry-acamedia collaborations, and finally offers our personal views on the future of industry-academia collaboration.

This paper reports the survey of the possibility where humanities and social science research in the UK academic community can lead to innovation. The contents are divided into two parts. First, the properties of current research funding programmes which aiming at innovation provided by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) both belonging to UKRI (UK Research and Innovation), and BA (British Academy) are described using many examples. Next, the survey of case studies of impacts (impact on the society and economy, etc.), which appear in the REF (Research Excellence Framework) of research evaluation for UK universities reveals the possibility of the creation of innovation through these impacts. As a whole, this paper introduces the current status where the UK government and the academic community are actively supporting the possibility of creating innovation in the humanities and social sciences field.

This paper analyzes global innovation network with three distinguished features. First, the paper employs a newly proposed analytical framework that focuses on one specific overseas innovation site. In the case of this paper, Thailand is selected as a specific overseas innovation site. This framework enables us to observe the configuration of global innovation networks in a comparatively easy way. Second, the paper conducts a quantitative analysis using business transaction database of an international organization which is reliable and unbiased. Third, the paper finds out that the global innovation network patterns of Japanese companies, those of US (the United States of America) companies and those of German companies differ each other. For Japanese companies, the most frequent innovation network pattern is Japan-Thailand collaboration; for US companies, it is Thailand alone though relatively diverse patterns are recognized; and for German companies the most frequent innovation network patterns are the network of Germany, Thailand and the third country or countries, and Germany-Thailand collaboration.

It has been pointed out that the situation surrounding doctoral human resources in Japan is such that excellent master's degree students avoid entering doctoral programs due to factors such as the lack of financial support for doctoral students, the uncertainty of career paths for doctoral graduates, and the unstable employment environment. For example, nearly half of those who enter doctoral programs now have working experience, and there is room to enhance measures that take into account these changes in doctoral students.

In this paper, the background and history of the policy on doctoral human resources in Japan will be explained from a bird's-eye view, and the policy on doctoral human resources, especially those who are described in the 6th Basic Plan as "global leaders of knowledge" who have "acquired advanced problem-solving skills" and "respond to the needs of the times," and the new direction of development after that, will be discussed. The paper also looks forward to the direction of new developments in the future.