2. A Retrospective on the University–Industry Innovation Nexus in Japan: Empirical Assessment of Coauthorship in the Light of New Data

The role of public research in contributing to the innovation that drives economic development is rightfully a topic of concern for policymakers throughout the world. The huge amount of open research taking place primarily in universities and public research institutes represents a major deployment of research investment, and raises the question of whether the research goes on to support innovation and economic development for the benefit of the people who support that research, and global society as a whole. This has particularly been an issue in Japan, where large public research investments coincided with the onset of prolonged economic recession, and where there has been a dearth of the lauded signs of the university–industry innovation nexus, such as university-originated spin-off companies or lucrative university-held patents. Supported by the lack of these signs, an assumption of a disconnect between university research and industrial development emerged as the conventional wisdom, upon which most research policy prescriptions have been based. With this as background, the author conducted a series of research studies from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s during the first of Japan’s so-called “lost decades,” and demonstrated empirically that the disconnect hypothesis was incorrect. In fact, the university–industry innovation nexus was quite strong as measured via industry support of university research, university–industry coauthored research, and economic development based on university-sourced patents. This finding—particularly the strong and growing trend of university–industry coauthorship of scientific publications over the 1981–1996 time period—was so contrarian to the conventional wisdom that skeptics doubted the veracity of the finding and questioned whether the trend was real or an aberration. Those doubts were debunked at the time based on the available data, but temporal distance would be required for a verification of the robustness in the time trend. With the benefit of two decades of hindsight and a secondary source dataset for the 1981–2004 time period, this new study was finally able to verify the university–industry coauthorship metrics. The findings of this new study fully reconfirm the 1981–1996 results, and demonstrate empirically that the trend of rising university–industry coauthorship continued unabated through the 2004 end point of the new dataset.