Tokyo

Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has linked up with the country's ministries of education and health to tackle a tricky problem: how to spur joint public-private research.

The result is the creation of two three-year grant programmes to fund joint research projects in new industries, with the hope of paving the way for commercialization and start-up companies.

Grants funded by MITI and the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho) will be targeted at information technology, energy/environment and biotechnology. Grants for work by industry and the Ministry of Health will target the development of instruments for the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease and cancer, as laid out in the Medical Frontiers programme announced this spring.

The scale is small. But “the cooperation between ministries, and its establishment as a permanent part of the budget are quite significant accomplishments in a Japanese setting,” says Yukio Kawaguchi, who runs MITI's collaboration with Monbusho.

MITI expects to receive most of the ¥1 billion (US$9.3 million) it will request from the government for the grants with Monbusho, and probably a large fraction of its request for those with the health ministry. Selected projects will receive about ¥100 million from MITI; industry would need to invest half that again.

A programme announced last year for joint research between industry and universities was financed from a supplementary budget, meaning that the money had to be spent in one year — a short period to develop new technologies, say MITI officials (see Nature 402, 116; 1999).

Koichi Sumikura of Tokyo University's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology agrees that a three-year budget will “allow rollover and avoid some wastefulness of projects whose budget must be exhausted in one year”. At the end of three years, government support would end and, it is envisioned, entrepreneurs would be able to exploit the joint research.

University researchers' enthusiasm for the project is still in doubt. The lifting of some restrictions, which allowed researchers to take up executive positions in companies (see Nature 403, 588; 2000), has yet to stir much interest.

Part of the problem, says Kawaguchi, is that “universities are less demanding than in the United States, and many researchers will tell you they are simply too comfortable to take a risk in industry”. The current programme is designed to allow them to develop their technologies, and perhaps gain some new research equipment, without risk.

But problems with intellectual property could lessen industry's interest in joint research. Any action taken on a patent in Japan must be agreed to by all holders. Thus, even if a university were to hold only a small share of the patent, warns one Ministry of Health official, the prospective entrepreneur “would have to deal with lengthy bureaucratic deliberations on the use of the patent”.

MITI's Medical and Welfare Equipment Industries section chief Yukiko Araki admits that, although MITI and the health ministry share the same goals, many details of funding and other procedural matters are still in need of attention.