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Persons with postgraduate degrees or higher are becoming the primary players of research and development. Despite expansion in the number of persons with postgraduate degree, a large gap with the U.S. persists. Measures are required to secure and train enough number of talented researchers to satisfy needs in each research field.

Researchers are beginning to view postdoctoral research experience as important to their careers as researchers, although societal recognition of this "postdoctor" is by no means firmly established. Many private enterprises responded to the survey that they have no plans to employ either doctoral or postdoctoral researchers.

The dissemination of the achievements of such researchers is needed to enable these researchers to find new employment in research. This is needed to encourage research institutes to hire doctoral and postdoctoral researchers more actively, to raise the status of such researchers, and encourage students to pursue more-advanced research experience, thereby raising the overall quality of researchers.

Despite expanded budget for new measures for hiring of research assistants, reducing the number of assistants employed by the program of reductions of public servant and attrition with retirement, etc., have prevented to attain the goal for number of research assistants per researcher from being reached. As the duties of research assistants are expanded to include the works concerning application of patents and competitive funding, research support functions must be strengthened and expanded to satisfy these diverse needs.

Talented foreign researchers, who could be important research assets, should be promoted to employ in order to secure world-caliber intellectual talent on an international scale. Such researchers' firm establishment in Japan's research community should also be promoted. This will not only improve Japan's R&D potential directly, but will also help stimulate Japanese researchers intellectually.

The competitive research fund is increasing in Japan, examples being the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research and the Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology (SCF). Nonetheless, competitive funding accounts for 30% of total R&D budgets in the U.S. and the UK but only about 10% in Japan ( Fig. 4 ).

Fig. 4: Competitive funding as a percentage of total science and technology budgets in the U.S., UK and Japan

Research environments must be made even more competitive by increasing the proportion of competitive research funding and evaluators who review applications for such funding should be increased and justified their evaluation.

Nearly 30% of researchers responding to a survey believe that the review process is not transparent or fair, while approximately 40% stated that comments regarding the results of review are not made known to the applicants themselves ( Fig. 5 ). Review procedures for competitive research funding that explain to unsuccessful applicants why they were turned down will provide those researchers will important intellectual lessons, motivating them and improving their abilities. Thus, competitive funding must be improved qualitatively by increasing the number of evaluators, providing increased funding for evaluators, and by notifying unsuccessful applicants of the reasons for being passed over.

Fig. 5: Reasons that the selection of topics for competitive funding is not perceived as transparent or fair

One of the most important prerequisites for actualizing competitive R&D environments is impartial R&D evaluation and the reflecting of evaluation results in resource allocation and compensation, for instance.

In addition to raising the quality of evaluation by broadening the pool of evaluators, it is also necessary to enhance evaluation by improving and developing innovative evaluation techniques and by reflecting the results of evaluation in resource allocation.

Facilitating the transfer the findings of governmental and quasi governmental research to the society is an important issue in science and technology policy.

As of April 16, 1999, six technology transfer office had been approved under the Law to Promote the Transfer to the Private Sector of the Results of Technological Research at Universities and Other Institutions.

With respect to patent and other rights resulting from joint or contracted research, government agencies are working out the details of contracts and agreements that permit by priority licensing by the institutions involved in the joint or contracted research. Between 1995 and 1998, the number of licenses granted has increased substantially.

To expedite the transfer of research results, government agencies have prepared the standards for permitting the concurrent employment of researchers in the public sector, and have also improved the rules under which patent rights revert to the individual. The result has been an increase in the number of permission of concurrent employment at national research institutes and in the number of patent rights reverted to the researchers.

To take such efforts even further, universities, national research institutes, special corporations and regional research institutions founded by local governments must strive to be seen by the private sectors as a rich source of knowledge. Other important issues that must now be addressed include promoting ventures based on the results of research at universities or national research institutes, assigning persons judicious enough to assess both private enterprises and, universities and national research institutes. It is also important to foster the entrepreneurial spirit among university students.