For years, officials in Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and their somewhat less enthused colleagues in the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (Monbusho) have been trying to encourage academics to work more closely with industry.

Earlier this year, regulations were eased to allow university faculty members to assume executive positions in industry (see Nature 403, 589; 2000), and now a new fund has been created to encourage interaction between the universities and industry (see News, pages 925–926). But if these measures are to have any effect, some deeply embedded attitudes — reflected in ideas about patenting and in some seemingly petty regulations — will have to be overcome.

As public employees, university researchers often hesitate to join hands with industry, fearing criticism that they are seeking to profit from research done at the public's expense. At the same time, individual researchers are hesitant to put in all the hard work needed to produce a proper patent for industrial use if they cannot profit from it. Under current regulations, short of going through what many consider a prohibitively laborious evaluation process, all patents and royalties revert to the university, not to the individual.

For its part, industry is loath to fork out money for university research when patents are unlikely to be filed promptly or written with great enough breadth to promise high returns. It is also concerned that patents are going to be tied to conservative public institutions, rendering their use or sale dependent on lengthy, bureaucratic deliberations. In the current state of play, there is “no hope that we can win in the patent war”, one official laments.

Then there is what might be termed ‘the cake problem’. University and national institute researchers are being encouraged to work with industry, but strict regulations laid down this March (the same month as those allowing university faculty members to assume executive positions in industry) limit their personal interaction. As one frustrated researcher puts it: “We can't even have cake together. Tea is probably OK. It's hard to tell exactly.” Such regulations even prohibit university lecturers from having lunch with graduate students, lest their ability to evaluate them objectively is compromised.

The background to these regulations lies in Japan's unfortunate recent history of golf-club memberships and fancy dinners being used to bribe public officials. The blanket coverage of all public employees, including university staff, may seem arbitrary. But legislators probably fear that publicly funded researchers (and thus public resources) are vulnerable in their collaborations with industrial partners — a criticism that arises even of the university–industry partnerships that are now well established in the United States.

Although recession has cut into Japan's vaunted industrial research sector, university–industry collaborations have the potential to play an important role in sustaining Japan's industrial might. But over-zealous efforts to protect researchers from being tainted by contacts with commerce are likely to foil the government's efforts to bring industry and the universities together.

Academics' lack of familiarity with the patent system is an additional impediment to progress. Setting up some technology licensing offices at the universities could go a long way towards addressing that problem. But, if scientists are going to respond actively and enthusiastically to its initiatives, the government will have to coordinate its efforts better and devise a workable regulatory framework for interaction between universities and industry.