The Innovation Advocate: Combining Science and Policy
An interview with Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a science, technology, and innovation policy advisor in Japan, who discusses his strategies for fostering scientific change.
Published September 1, 2008
By Leslie Taylor
Academy Contributor
Kiyoshi Kurokawa is special advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet on science, technology, and innovation issues. He chairs the strategy council for “Innovation 25,” Japan’s long-term initiative to encourage transformation in medicine, engineering, and information technology by the year 2025. He also sits on The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) President’s Council and is an advisor to Scientists Without Borders.
How do you define innovation?
Innovation is a change. It may be a new technology or a combination of new technologies that brings about a major breakthrough, that creates and delivers new social values.
The information revolution of the last decade or so was like the industrial revolution. The creation of the World Wide Web in 1992 was the beginning of our connected world and triggered many new concepts and technologies. Google was founded in 1997. Within 10 years it created a tremendous impact on the way we think and behave. And built on that, new businesses emerged throughout the world.
On the Innovation 25 Web site you write about the importance of a “society where high-spirited, highly creative people are willing to take on any risks to play an active role.” What other qualities are important for an innovator?
A passionate researcher may spend time trying to discover why humans usually die around the age of 70 or 80 or 100, but cannot live to be 200. But their research results and discoveries may not always help transform society until somebody from outside or within the community looks at those advances with more perspective. Someone with different skills and a different perspective could bring up some new idea or solution. And that’s where the innovation is.
There are quite a number of people who are passionately pursuing their own inquiries. But we need somebody who can see the much bigger picture, who has a different perspective and can relate the views of all the different multiple stakeholders. One person can change the world very quickly.
Exceptional, extraordinary individuals—not necessarily scientists, but those who understand science—can use their combination of skills to turn a discovery into something, to bring something new to the world, and to disseminate a new idea or new product. It is more likely that those people who have a different way of thinking, who are not bound by conventional wisdom, will bring something new.
What are some of the strategies that governments or universities can use to encourage innovators?
The new paradigm of the economy is different from the old paradigm of mass production and mass consumerism and standardization. The old corporate structure was very hierarchical, specialized, and integrated, and also financed through the bank. But it becomes quite different in our ‘flattening’ world. People are not afraid to challenge and take risks that will deliver new social values. That is innovation.
One of the messages in innovation is: to be different may create a value. For example, if you are organizing a research institute, its value is more likely to increase if you try to recruit many investigators or scientists with different backgrounds and different ideas. Heterogeneity is key because different views are more likely to create a new way of thinking.
Suppose you have a great research institute with very smart people, but all with the same cultural background. They are more likely to share the same values and will tend to see the same thing in the same way and that’s not going to create any sort of new ideas or outcomes.
How do market forces influence people to be innovative?
The marketplace and industry are major driving forces for innovation. Academic researchers and universities provide the seeds and the potential for social value creation, but it is really the private sector that makes it so the general public begins to see the benefits of new ideas.
Research and technology engineers in the business sector may have a different view from individual scientists, so they may be well-positioned to consider or perceive [the significance of] new developments. Four billion dollars in venture capital poured into the clean energy sector in Silicon Valley last year. In 2006 the investment in that category was only $1 billion and the year before only half a billion. So, it suggests investors think the bright out-of-the-box thinkers working in that area could provide a new engine of economic growth by tackling a major global issue—climate change.
Also read: For the Public Good: Policy and Science
