Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the changes that have occurred in Japan’s research, development, and innovation policies and among Japanese academics since the early 1990s. The chapter argues that, despite a certain continuity and coherence between these policies, they also contain dramatic changes. It is fair to say that some of these policies and strategies led to successful outcomes, while others have so far ended in failure. Further, the chapter points out that there are many daunting problems to be solved, which the national government has not paid sufficient attention to since the 1990s. For example, firstly, Japan should reconsider its modest investments in R&D and the Japanese government’s weakness in investing public funds in higher education, especially as to academic productivity in universities. Secondly, Japan needs to make more efforts to promote the R-T-S nexus, strengthening not only research universities but also teaching-oriented universities, and ensure that business makes its fair share of investments in research productivity by encouraging collaborations between industry, business, and academia.
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Notes
- 1.
See Altbach (1996, p. 150) for information on how to collect data.
- 2.
The Japanese version of this questionnaire consists of 16 pages with 61 questions. Exactly 8807 questionnaires were mailed to 34 universities (5 research universities and 29 non-research universities). The number of faculty members responding to the survey was 2124 (710 from the 5 research universities, 1404 from the 29 non-research universities, and 10 respondents’ affiliations are not clear). The valid rate of response is 24.1 percent.
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Arimoto, A., Daizen, T., Huang, F. (2021). Changing Policies of Research, Development, and Innovation and the Characteristics of Academics in Japan. In: Aarrevaara, T., Finkelstein, M., Jones, G.A., Jung, J. (eds) Universities in the Knowledge Society. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76579-8_8
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