Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My name is Jim Scho. I'm a senior fellow here in the Asia program and charge of the Japan Initiative here. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you all. And we're very pleased and proud to be able to host the Abe Fellows Global Forum program, which is organized by the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. In just a minute, Linda Grove of the SSRC will tell you more about this program. She is the consulting director for the Tokyo Office of the Social Science Research Council, the senior advisor, the Abe Global Fellowship Program. She previously taught at Sophia University and in Tokyo and served both as a dean and vice president there. She's a specialist on China and Chinese history in particular. And you'll also get a chance to hear more from me later on in the program as I moderate. But before I turn it over to Linda, I just wanted to say a quick word of thanks to CGP and to SSRC for bringing this event to us. This is truly their event. They organized it and made all of this happen. We're just the host. This is a really terrific lineup of speakers and panelists and this is continuing the high-quality tradition of the Abe Fellowship Program. And the topic today I also wanted to underscore, Japanese and American innovation in a global age is a particular interest to me and to our program here because it connects to everything we do and all the research we do in the area of security cooperation, alliance security cooperation, relations with China, geopolitical and domestic political impacts of globalization, and many other issues. And this is something we work on in the Asia program but then also in collaboration with our technology and international affairs program as well. So I'm very interested in, we have a whole series of issues we're going to look at today and I'm excited to hear the discussion. So Linda, let me turn the podium over to you to say a few words of welcoming about the program and then we'll get started. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. We would be very happy if the head of the Center for Global Partnership was planning to come but he had a family emergency and wasn't able to come to the US. So on behalf of the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, I would like to begin by thanking our host here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for arranging this afternoon Abe Global Forum. I want to briefly explain the background of the Abe Fellowship program and of the Global Forums. The program is based on a partnership between the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership and the Social Science Research Council. The Center for Global Partnership was established 27 years ago at a time when contentious economic relations between Japan and the United States raised questions about the future of one of the world's most important bilateral relationships. At that time, Mr. Shintaro Abe, Japan's foreign minister and the father of the current prime minister, Shinzo Abe and his American counterpart, Secretary of State George Schulz, discussed the importance of creating and supporting stronger networks of scholarly as well as people-to-people links between the US and Japan. On the American side, the Social Science Research Council is one of or maybe the oldest American general social science organization originally founded, bringing together the heads of discipline-based social science organizations created almost a century ago and has played a leading role in supporting innovative social science research in the United States and in many foreign countries globally and the use of social science knowledge in forming public policy. The Abe Fellowship Program grew out of the shared commitment to supporting high-quality research on important global concerns, building collaborative networks, promoting transnational lines of inquiry, and ensuring the results of the research reach a wide group of policymakers and the public at large. In the years since its founding in 1991, the Center for Global Partnership and the SSRC have been partners in designing and running the Abe Fellowship Program. The Abe Fellowship Program supports international and comparative research on issues of pressing world concern. It celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016. Over the years, the program has supported 419 Abe Fellows, including 40 journalism fellows. And this diverse network of scholars working in a wide range of fields plays a major role in the US, Japan, intellectual collaborations and exchanges. The Abe Global Forum is a new initiative launched in 2017 to share the knowledge of the Abe Fellows with broader audiences in the United States. In 2017, we held three Abe Global Forums, the first two on the theme of confronting climate change. What can the US and Japan contribute to creating sustainable societies? We're held in partnership with the Asia Society, Texas Center in Houston, and Stanford University's Walter H. Schoenstein Asia Pacific Research Center. At the Stanford event, one of the addresses was, in fact, given by Secretary George Schultz, who had been a partner and inspiration for the program from the very beginning. The third forum on the theme Japan and the leadership of the world trading system was held in partnership with the Columbia University's Business School Center for Japanese Business and Economics. You can find the full reports of these sessions from last year on the SSRC homepage website. This year, we have selected Japanese and American innovation in a global age as the theme for the two events, which are one was held on Saturday in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the one today here at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We chose this theme because we believe that a serious discussions of issues related to technology and innovation, which have so transformed the world we live in, is essential as our society's struggle to find ways to incorporate rapid technological change. As we all know, technological innovation has brought many benefits over the last century. Innovations in biology and medicine have banished diseases that once shortened lives. New communication technologies have eased access to knowledge, and the internet of things has enriched our daily lives and opened up windows to worlds we would not have seen before. But at the same time, those technologies have also created major challenges, testing whether we can continue to maintain open societies in a world of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, which provides powerful weapons that can be used for surveillance and control. Both the US and Japan have long taken pride in their robust scientific research communities, contributions to economic growth and human welfare. But the slowing pace and rising costs of state-sponsored research, along with strong competition from China and India, have challenged both governments to rethink their approaches to science and technology policy and set agendas that encourage innovation towards solving big social problems. Our keynote speakers and the panelists come from a variety of social science disciplines, and one of them also has a background in engineering. And they will have different takes on some of the questions and some of the solutions. The panelists will consider the institutional factors that encourage or discourage innovation, the impact of big data analysis and other AI technologies on innovation policies and strategies, comparisons of the organizations of cultures of innovation in Japan, the United States, and other Asian countries, conflicts between the interests of private companies, national interests, and international welfare, and challenges for the future of innovation. We look forward to a stimulating forum and the enthusiastic participation of the audience in the Q&A and discussant sessions. So I now return the microphone to Jim to introduce our speakers. Thank you very much, Linda. You did a terrific job of highlighting the dynamism of this issue. It really cuts at the heart of what both of our countries are struggling with right now in terms of promoting and also staying on top of the innovation cycle. And I'm particularly pleased to welcome our keynote speaker today who is perfectly positioned to talk to us about some pretty interesting policy approaches. And I'll let him go through the details. But I find what Tokyo is trying to do quite interesting and relevant to today. Dr. Takahiro Uiyama is our keynote speaker. He's currently executive member of the Council of Science, Technology, and Innovation, or SISTI, in Tokyo. He's a graduate of Stanford University and Osaka University, later teaching it also at Sophia University on the Faculty of Economics and served as dean there, as well, and then as professor at Keio University for policy management until 2015. And then he went on to be vice president at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, or GRIPS, and he is an award-winning author. He's an accomplished scholar who combines the experience of history, economics, and policy that I think make him a very valuable member of SISTI and the Council there. And he's going to talk to us about the latest views from Japan and the Japanese government on these issues. So Dr. Uiyama, let me give you the morning of the Konnichiwa. I'm Takahiro Uiyama, full-time member of the Council for Science, Technology, Innovation, and the Cabinet Office. And I really express my sincere gratitude to SSRC and other fellowships, because I got the fellowship in 2001. It is a momentum event for my life because after I finished a PhD at Stanford University, I returned to Japan to be a professor at the Soviet University. And then I decided to go back again to Stanford because I was interested in the formation of Silicon Valley, particularly focusing on the research university, such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco. I began to make intensive work on the archival of Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco because I wanted to know what kind of impact the research university, such as the university, has been down to the formation of Silicon Valley. And I found it quite interesting. And without the other fellowship, I couldn't do that. And after I returned to Japan, I compiled one book, which is the one part of my research. And then after that, I wanted to keep research about the Silicon Valley. But I'm very unfortunate. I was recruited by the government. And I stopped my research right now. So I really hope someday I return to the academia and resume my work in the field of other science and technology policies. And today, it is very honored to be here to talk about Japan's new science and technology innovation policy. We just started right now because I joined the council two and a half years ago. Even before that, I was one of the member of the committee under the umbrella of CISTI to discuss about the fifth basic plan. Because the council is the headquarter office which creates the five-year basic plan for science, technology, and innovation. And actually, it was created after the CSDP of the United States. And actually, the nature and the characteristics of the CISTI has been really changed. And in 2014, actually, CSDP became the CISTI by adding the world of innovation. Sumina slightly changed to more economic or social issues. This is one of the reasons I was recruited to be a member of the CISTI because I am not a scientist. I am a social scientist. And it is also a very unfortunate that I am the only one full-time member of the council. This is very strange because I will always complain to the government. The full-time member should be a natural scientist. But I can support or I can help this natural scientist to make any sort of policy because I am an expert in the policy studies. But for some reason, it is a kind of very interesting story actually there, very complicated, very political, and I don't want to get into that detail. But anyway, so since I joined the council, I became so serious. I became seriously, I'm thinking very seriously about what kind of contribution I can make to that advancement of science and technology as a social science, not natural science, because I can't provide scientific advice to the prime minister for any specific natural phenomena. But this council was very closely tied with the cabinet office and also the prime minister's office. So every one, one month, every two months, I have a chance to talk with the prime minister. And I know, so to give some advices you are some of the exchange opinion with the cabinet office members, as you see here right now. And then, as a social scientist, I have to show some sort of a resolution to the current problem that we are facing in terms of the science and technology and innovation. And let me begin with this short statement. This is made in 2014 when we are making the fifth basic problem for science and technology. I was one of the members to discuss about the future program. And then one of the member, and most of them actually agreed this kind of sense that I'm gonna read, it is really possible for a country to hand over its economic prosperity and development dream and prospect for rosy future to the next generation. We are now at the crossroad to the future. We should make every effort to reconstruct our society with a strong sense of crisis. Reforming a society and economy is our generation duty to the next generation. Our society has reached a critical stage and the government must create new package of science and technology policies to solve unmet needs and the problem. This is a very, I found this is a very strong statement, but I think I still have shared this sense of crisis as a member of the cabinet office. And then we haven't discussed about any sort of possibility to change our current situation to more fruitful, more good directions. Actually, today under the success of a banal mix, we are now escaping from the kind of the deflation of a spider. But however, the serious social challenges remain. As you see that the declining birth rate and a rapidly aging society, the gap and separation between the enterprise, large enterprise and small and medium enterprise and also the urban and rural areas. And also that we are sort of a confrontation between the older generation and the younger generation. And these problems, the challenges, of course, not Japan's are wrong. Actually, other countries are what will soon be confronting them as well. So this is a kind of common challenge that we have to face right now. And Japan is a typical case in discussing about these kind of problems. How can Japan overcome these challenges? That's in Japan's basic science and technology. We launched a new concept, so-called society 5.0, which propose an advanced human-centered society in which sort of that, sorry. Sort of the integration of cyberspace and the physical space is going to be realized through the state of our technology, such as AI, internet, options, or big data, et cetera. So this is a new concept. And I found this concept. It is not a concept I made, actually. I was sort of involved with making this concept within the concept, but it is not my idea. But kind of we are discussing about it. We should go and get into the kind of the super smart society by using the new technology. And this concept represents a quite interesting connotation. Very Japanese actually. Very, you know, very advanced human-centered society in which everybody can enjoy the services, the product, regardless in gender and language differences, or phrases, et cetera. So there were very much egalitarian society we are considering right now. And this is very Japanese one. And also the concept itself is quite neat. Very Japanese. Like this is kind of representation of the picture of the society 5.0, the following the hunter-gathering society, the ugly, it's a number of society 5.0, that we call the society 2.0. And then the industrial society that launched the mass production and mass consumption through the industrialization 3.0. And the information society that merged the communication and the computer. And then the society 5.0 means the fifth chapter in human history. In which the problem that the previous could not solve became solvable as people and things are connected and all technology converge. And also that in order to create all technological platform for society 5.0, the city chose 11P, such as energy value chains, healthcare, global environmental information, internet, intelligent transportation system, infrastructure maintenance system, disaster or preventive system, et cetera. We wanted to construct kind of big data to deal with these kind of new technology in the cyberspace. And then these any sort of information which is get to gather from the sensor installed in all of the things in the society and created a kind of big data. It's gonna feed back to the humans in the physical society. That is a basic idea. You can see that all of the mass data is going to be gathered to the central places in the government or somewhere. And also it's gonna be fed back to the physical society. So I said, this is not a concept I made. And also sometimes it is very weird I found when I first heard this concept. And also I always asked myself, where is the society 5.0 in Japan? In order to make this society reality, we have to focus on some part of Japan is going to be transformed to the society 5.0. So where is the society 5.0? You know, sometimes people say that the Kyushu Maribir example, because a lot of people there and a lot of technology there. And also the independent concern is going to be available in the sphere. And also that Tokyo may be a good example for the society 5.0, but I don't think so. I don't think, I can't find any places in Japan. The society 5.0 is really realized. But since I joined the council, we actually have been discussed a lot and also going somewhere like here, talk about a society 5.0. The concept of society 5.0 became so popularized, particularly within the Asia. For example, China approached us. They are very interested in making society 5.0 in somewhere in China. And their proposal was very interesting to us that, you know, they're going to provide a city, any city you can choose. And we're going to provide as much as possible, we're going to use the money to create a society 5.0 in any place in China. But Singapore government also approached it. This is a very interesting concept. And then Thailand and then China, this kind of government has become so interesting in this kind of concept. So I find that the concept itself quite interesting, but it's so difficult to make this reality. But as I said before, as a member of the council, I have to think very seriously about how to make this concept of reality in somewhere, not only Japan, but also somewhere in the world.  And also that I can't, I don't have time to get into the detail, the second point that we are now facing, the declining of research productivity. The number of the article published by Japanese scientists actually declining. The top ranked paper, the 10% cited paper is also declining. And then the position of research university of Japan is declining in the world university of ranking. So I mean, this is kind of very serious matter, particularly in the basic scientists is really worried about the future of the Japanese basic researchers. In 2004, all of the National University were incorporated, mean that became a quasi-private university. After that, ministry of finance decided to decrease the block funding, the basic operational funding in 1% every year and move this kind of saved money to the competitive funding such as JSPS, JST, or NIDO or some sort of funding agencies. After 15 years, 14 years actually, this kind of decrease of the block funding had a great impact on the performance of National University. As I said before, the status of all National University actually declining right now is one of the serious matter for us. So I can't get into the detail of this one, but it is kind of one of the elements I have to consider seriously as a member of the council. And also, we need to expand science and technology investment in the government because the investment on the science and technology is an investment for the future, investment for the younger generation. So definitely, we have to increase the STI budget in the government. And also, we need to, our own policy initiative to hook up with the science and technology, hook up science and technology into innovation processes. As I said before, the STI became a kind of the different organization from CSDP because by adding a notion of innovation to this council mean that shifting more and more the innovative type of activity would be needed in the discussion within the government. So that is one of the reasons I was recruited as a social science and a member of the council. And also, we need, the problem I found, a particular serious one is a need to expand the government around the investment under the serious financial constraint. We have a serious national debt and a financial debt. Now, the social security expenditure continue to rise almost one trillion yen every year. We can't save this expenditure because we have to take care of the age of people. We have to take care of the health care of these population. So it is very difficult to cut this budget drastically. But also, we already promised that we're going to increase the science and technology investment every, you know, like we need to kind of combine the public private sector around the investment at least 4% of GDP, future GDP, 600 trillion yen. And also government around the investment of at least 1% of GDP of 600 trillion yen. So this is a conundrum because we have to increase the science and technology investment but also we are facing a serious financial problem. How we can solve this conundrum? This is one of the mission I have to solve and this is very difficult for us, you know, as a social scientist. And we look at this in Japan's R&D intensity, R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP. Actually, Japan's one is quite low, better than Korea's one 1%, you know, better than Germany's 1, 0.82.  And also, as I said before, we promised that we are going to increase science and technology investment for the future. This is a promise to the public. This is a promise to the government. This is a promise for the society. So we have to increase at least 900 billion yen over three years, in that we have to increase 300 billion yen per year. How we can make this money from such a serious financial constraint? This is a headway for me. This is a really serious matter and I found it so difficult. During the past two and a half year, I have been thinking always what kind of method I can come across to solve this problem. And this is the one of the answers today, is kind of evidence-based policy making. Because, you know, the past two years is a history of that I have been fighting against the Ministry of Finance. You know, Ministry of Finance always want to cut the budget. It isn't their natural tendency to acquire tax revenue and also cut everything. They can't cut the national defense. They can't cut the social security. But I always say that, you know, why science and technology investment should be an exception, even though this is a kind of investment for the future. Well, you know, look at the performance of National University. Look at the performance of scientists in Japan. You know, as I said before, these kind of matters is declining. How you can explain that this malfunction, this ineffectiveness of investment to the public, to the society, they are always pressing us and you should show the evidence that you need additional investment in the field of science and technology. Right? And as far as I know, all of the Ministry, even the Ministry of Education, even the Ministry has failed to explain these kind of evidences to the Ministry of Finances. Sumida, what happened to the science and technology in academia is that Ministry of Finance always intervening the activity of the Ministry of Education and even the METI, you know, you're just lazy. You know, you just kind of make, you're not kind of playing a good role in initiating the higher education, initiating the science and technology. So naturally I have to find another answer to the Ministry of Finance. This is the kind of evidence that supports in making. First idea the last year is that we define the very meticulous, what is the science and technology budget? What is the not science and technology budget? Actually the demarcation between science and technology and not science technology is very broad at the time. So what I did is that, okay, we should look at everything of science and technology budget about 38 billion dollars. And I took the two approach. Number one is I need to look at the cross-ministerial, cross-departmental analysis of government budget. Not only just the METI, not only just the METI, I need to look at all the ministers, all of the project program of government. It's actually, which actually numbered over 5,000. There was over 5,200 program project were actually implemented by each minister. And we decided to look at everything. There is a kind of document called Administrative Review Seats, which contain the detail of each project, outcome, output, and input, outcome, and output. And what kind of target they are making to implement their project. So it's a kind of detail of the document. So we collected these over 500, about 5,000 document and make a natural wrongly analysis by using machine learning to understand the depths of a linkage between the terms used in the document with our science and technology, the program. So we matched kind of the chapter by chapter, section by sections, which chapter is going to support by METI, Minister of Health Care, Minister of Transportation, et cetera. So you find out why this project can be implemented by which minister with the project, which minister the project, you know. Number two is that institutional approach. Look at this one, it is kind of 3.3, 45 billion dollars. One cell is actually implemented by each minister. No, 38% or 40% were implemented by each minister here. This one, this one, right? The other one, this is kind of, this is a university. This is a kind of block funding to national university. This product is about 30% is used by the national issue, the writer, Lee Ken, or Sun So Ken, or some sort of the big national issue there. So I wanted to see everything inside this to understand and to make a clear cut planning for science and technology with the limited amount of government money. And then 5,000 here. So, and look at this, it's kind of, this is a kind of total risk, Japan's total around the expenditures. The government, what the government occupied here is only 90%. I mean that more than 70%, 80% of R&D has been actually implemented by the private company. Sumida, I found that less than 20%, it was small amount of money in concerning whole set of Japan's R&D expenditure. But this is making some sort of the direction to all set of the R&D expenditure. What I thought is that we need to use this money as a trigger to the private sector behavior. So what kind of connection we can make between government investment with the private companies R&D? Actually right now, all of the internal money of the company is over 400 trillion yen. For trillion dollar actually. After the Rima shock, most of the Japanese company became very risk a burst. They don't want to spend money for the R&D in the future. So how can change, we can change the behavior of private sectors to more kind of aggressive, more outgoing investment in the field of science and technology. This is one of the thing I have to consider. The other one is that kind of again, the research environment of National University. I have been collecting all data of National University, all National University, 86 National University. Actually I haven't been collecting most of the research university like the University of Tokyo, University of Kyoto, Osaka, et cetera. Collecting the financial data, collecting the personal data, the data of wages and salaries, also data of the teaching, et cetera. I wanted everything to understand the performance of National University. Because I have been deeply involved with the reform of National University because National University has been all so outmoded as compared with Stanford, Herbert, which I am very familiar with. They are kind of industry of knowledge, not the kind of university. You can't describe these kind of research university as just a higher education. This is really the big industry. You know, look at the Stanford University, the endowment of the huge, the Herbert, et cetera, particularly after the 1980s, their financial resources has been expanded so rapidly. Every year, almost 6% or 7% increase. Meaning that in 10 years, the total budget of Stanford, Herbert, doubled. How we can compete with this kind of research university. Even the University of Tokyo cannot fight against these trends. So what we have to do is that we need more money to the National University, but we don't have money. It means that we have to open the door to the private sector money in a way of donation, in a way of collaboration with the industry, or in a way of indirect costs from the industry money, et cetera, or maybe the education fee. But what I have, what I want to do is that I want to see the kind of the financial or intellectual atmosphere, environment of research university. Because as a social scientist, I know that many people has been done on the research about the input-output analysis, like input from NIH or input from NSF, et cetera, find out the performance of each scientist. But always, having always argued that, you know, this is not enough, because to understand the performance, to understand the behavior of scientists, you have to look at kind of basic environment, basic atmosphere of researchers. And I was saying that scientists is not a machine. Scientists is not a machine in who want to get the money from competitive funding, write a paper, get the patent, get the reputation, that's all. No, I don't think so, because we are settled in the university because Stanford University environment is much, much superior than to the university of Tokyo. So the kind of, such kind of institutional background must be analyzed. So for that reason, I have been collecting all of the data of National University. Here is one, you know, there are also a budget of Japanese government for the science and technology. Well, most of them, 64% were used by the Minister of Education, next. And many plays a quite important role in terms of science and technology. But you can see many other ministers actually related to the science and technology. So what I have done is, okay, we should make some sort of a detailed analysis of each minister's budget, which is contributable to the science and technology and made a kind of research and development. This red one is where we did science and technology budget, okay? So I made a distinction from here. This isn't science and technology. This is not science and technology. But here, it is quite an interesting budget which is usable from any minister. Like, you know, making kind of a strategic problem of intellectual property, or education for the entrepreneurship, or a kind of standardization of technology, et cetera. This is not the kind of science and technology, but the kind of process by which some of the technology can be converted to the more innovative activity in the society. So let me talk later about this element. What is the policy target implement the basic problem for science and technology? Just show the movie here, you know? As I said, we can show in the system the each section of the chapter of the basic problem. Now find the section by section, the chapter by chapter of the basic problem is correlated with any sort of the project in the ministers. This is quite interesting. And also, this is kind of the connection between the 70 goals of SDGs. You know, for example, this is an example. It is, sorry, it is kind of an example here, right? And it is kind of targeting the solving the hunger society and solving the poverty problem. Here is, you know, which a minister is providing the specific money to solve solving the poverty problem in the world, right? And then you can show the percentage of the linkage of all of this one. Is it put here? Okay, maybe the 10% is coming from some of the minister. Some part is going to come from the minister of education where health care, et cetera. What I want to do in this system is that, okay? And also, you can create any sort of the target. For example, AI or the buyer. If you want to create a bio-strategy, which project of each minister is related to the kind of the bio-issue, et cetera. So by targeting the specific policies, we can discuss with each minister. What last year we did is that, you know, we called all of the minister, the chief of the bureau, okay, why don't you come to the city to discuss about the current situation of energy, current situation of bio-strategy, current situation of AI, et cetera. And why this specific project is quite similar to the project of the different minister. This is a kind of redundancy. So we should kind of save the money to, you know, get rid of this project and make another project within your minister. This is a thing that we have been done. So we started redefining the concept of innovation. So I don't want to focus on the kind of just economic issue of innovation. I just focus on the process in which that some sort of technological advancement is going to be converted into more innovative activity in the society, right? And then, for example, the strategy policy for intellectual property or government procurement. Or a new type of SBIR, which is not usable in Japan, and a standardization of the specific technology, or the concept of society-fine point there should be standardized in the global setting, such as you see in the case of industry 4.0. We want to make the society-fine point there more popularized in the global world, and then want to make this concept a kind of standard of in thinking about the future society in the world. And we call this kind of innovationization, the government budget. I'm returning here, you know. This one, this category of government budget is not so much related to advanced high technology, but it is kind of providing some money to enhance the process of innovations. And our 3.8 billion, 38 billion dollars does not contain this part of the category. So I call this category sort of an innovation investment budget. So picking up some sort of project from this year, this category, we can discuss why this, why specific project, the program, is not usable, is not feasible, is not efficient in the current situation. So this is the kind of process we are making right now. Absolutely, stop. For some reason. So as I said before, I'm not a natural scientist. As a social scientist, I have to consider a different type of approach to science and technology policies. Keep it going. So this year, actually, the intermediate year of the basic program, this basic program, we launched the new type of strategy called Integrated Innovation Strategy, 2018. And in the process of creating this strategy, actually we decided to integrate all sort of the functions related to science and technology under the aegis of the system. We made a kind of the minister meeting with the prime chief cabinet officer of the Suwakambo Chokun as a chief and then created some meeting. And through that kind of integrated political meeting, we decided to order each minister how to manage your doing successfully or not about the science and technology related to the budget. So there is a kind of concept integrated innovation strategy, basic concept is that current structure is very rigid. So we should make this more flexible and age agile structure. And the background is, well, global game has been changed so radically. So we have to catch up with these kind of situation. We are kind of way back. So we have to make some path away from the path of trajectory of social SDI policies. And then we need a kind of very much comprehensive strategy on science and technology in 2018. Number one idea is kind of university reform as I mentioned, you know. We formulated national university a core center for the science and technology and also the core center of knowledge-intensive clusters. So we created the new style of research university. Like first we did is we categorized all 86 national university into three layers. One is very high-ranked university such as university Tokyo Kyoto is a world-class university which are very strong in all of you. Number two is research university which contains some sort of competitive view but it's not all. The other one, the last one is a regional university which can be contributed to the regional society and regional economy. We want to change the kind of governance and management style of national university from just a national one to more private type of university. And we already changed the kind of the tax deduction system of national university then right now national university will be able to accept stocks as a donation and keep the stock within the national university. But before that they have to sell all the stock they accept it from anybody but right now they can keep the stock and sell whatever they want to find. This is kind of very good or not. So this is kind of three category and also the last year we created a designated new category called designated national university. We want to create a kind of seriously world premier university and we chose five university as designated national university include University of Tokyo, University of Osaka, Kyoto, Tohoku, Nagoya as well. So probably other national university want to be selected as a designated national university but they have to show their evidence why they have to be category as a designated national university, et cetera. Also we created kind of the data policies. We have three types of pillars of the data solution fusion. We consider that data is a kind of source of innovation. Number one data is social data. It's going to be a platform for the society 5.0. It's a kind of combination of the government data which is huge with the data of the private company. We want to create a kind of a linkage between private sector and the public sector in terms of the connection that is useful to any part of the approach in the society. Number two is academic data. In the face of the open science movement we are going to open some sort of research data to the world but also we want to create a kind of closed and open strategy of research data. Particularly we are providing a big public funding to the scientists and then now probably in the future we want to collect all of the research data from each scientist because by collecting the data from national university what I'm doing that I'm putting all of the people that ID number including a professor, a postdoc, et cetera find out their performance within the university and then we are going to ask them why don't you give your own data? It's going to be a secret. We are not disclosing the data to anybody but the future some of the data you have cultivated might be useful to the other researchers within the Japan. So we are kind of making some linkage between a different type of research data in the control of government. That is what I'm thinking right now. And also the official data, government data is kind of evidence based policy making that I explained right now. So we have created three type of the pillars of data solution in the government. This is number two. Number three is that the new policy for the converging government budget from non-science and technology to science fund. Okay, sorry. Yeah, because what I have been doing like I found some project is not kind of very much public work doesn't have a science technology but I have been discussing with each minister that if you put some sort of research and development element in your public work it's going to be converted to the science technology related to budget. So I mean it is the only way I think I thought that possible to increase the science and technology budget under such a serious financial constraint by doing that we converted many of the project from non-science to science and technology budget particularly in the case of the minister of agriculture and minister of transportation. They are just providing subsidy to the public work but some of the element must be converted to more science and technological money. Like if you use the icon selection to keep the infrastructure you can make some sort of research and development in your budget or you can create a self-driving tractor. You can make these kind of investment or science and technology investment in your public work in the field of agriculture, okay. By doing that we successfully increased the science and technology budget 7% from last year to this year about 2.5 billion dollars. So this is almost everything I have done for two and a half years and I wanted to achieve this program project within 60 because this is the only 60 can do this one. So all of the headquarter within the government is going to be integrated into that 60 and if that are gonna happen in the near future probably 60 is going to be no longer the same organization as we see right now. Is it going to be maybe different council but different organization within the government and probably particularly powerful but it's also the kind of in the very much traditional period of time. There is one of the reason I was left alone in the council because I think that my position is very much traditional. So some of that I wanna recruit the natural scientist to be the member of my council but until that I wanted to work in our duties within the government. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Weyama sensei, I appreciate that. I think Dr. Weyama gives you a feel for how comprehensive and ambitious this initiative really is and how it really couldn't happen without I think the way that Japan's National Security Council and national security staff kind of the empowerment of the cabinet secretariat as it's become today and yet it may even become you're gonna need more than one full-time person I would think to carry some of this out. We have time, we've run a little bit over time in the front part but and Dr. Weyama will be joining our panel later after the Abe Fellows give their presentation. So there will be a chance to incorporate him in the conversation there but if anyone would like to ask a question right now just kind of especially specific to the presentation I'll take two questions and I have them here and if you can wait for a microphone and let us know who you are and a quick question if you can keep it quick and then so we'll go here and then over here. Thank you and I'll take the two questions and then I'll give Dr. Weyama a chance. That is an excellent presentation, very detailed and I learned a lot. I do have a question though that if you look at the United States immigration has been a great source of both growth and innovation. So what is Japan's position on immigration? I said the immigration, you know, well, sure, of course, yeah. All right, so the first question is immigration because I was educated in California. It is a place for the immigration. Immigrants, you know, that right now I have been always talking with the government that we should allow more, you know high-profile immigrant to Japan. I particularly get a PhD, I'm an MBA or MD in another country, we should, you know invite these kind of persons to Japan but so far it's very hard because the financial situation of academia is not so good to the researchers in other country. We want to recruit any of the immigrant, high-profile immigrant but we can't provide high, you know standard of salary to the person. So for that reason I have encouraged the university get more money from private sector. Let them give kind of the seed money to the person who recruited from the other country. That is only one thing. So I am focusing on the high-profile immigrant not the kind of immigrant but also that we are going to open the door to the immigrant, you know as you see the current situation of the administration actually slightly opening the door to the immigrant actually. This is gonna be happening another thing. So your question is that, you know I'm very familiar with the kind of policy making in this field, you know, of other country but as far as knowledge there is no country has to be done the kind of, the analysis I have been doing number one, the cross minister cross departmental analysis no country has been done actually. Even the UK has not been tackled in these kind of approach. Number two is that intensive collection of university data is also impossible particularly impossible in this country. I guess Stanford Harvard will not allow, you know this, you know, use their internal data to the government. No, they're gonna decline at all. But since I try to collect the data from national university, it is possible. It takes a time but I can persuade the president of each university. I can talk to the president national university of Tokyo, university of Kyoto. Okay, we need this data to create the new style of policy making regarding science and technology. So they agree, they provide the data to me. So I think it is very innovative, I guess. No other country has been done and it is very new challenge even for the policy makers in any sort of government, I guess, yeah. And that kind of source to make a linkage between the research, you know, the basic research with the entrepreneurship or startup, et cetera. It's going to make a new phase, I can think. I think as I told you that the 2018 will be remembered in 10 years, I guess. That is a watershed year in thinking about Japan's, you know, entrepreneurship. Japan's kind of the startup atmosphere because now many graduate student in university of Tokyo want to create their own startups on the basis of science and technology. This is quite new phenomena, actually, fun. Thank you very much, Uiyama sensei. We're going to get a chance to dive into even more detail in this after our presentations from the scholars. We're going to take a very short break, a five-minute break just to get ourselves set up here and get our panelists mic'd up. We'll hear from them one at a time and then we'll all get up front and have our group discussion and have more time for audience interaction. So five-minute break and then we'll get started. Please join me in thanking Professor Uiyama for his presentation. Then you are in there. Please. Hurry up, once, because Uiyama wants to use his own. Oh, okay. Sure. Only because the users don't want to hear. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, sorry to cut the conversation short, but we want to make sure we have enough time for our Abe fellow presentations and a panel discussion afterwards. So if I can ask you to retake your seats and we'll get started straight away. Thank you very much. So we have a great follow-up to our opening keynote presentation. Three of the Abe fellows are here with us today, all focusing on different aspects of the main topic of the day. We're going to take each presentation in turn and we're going to begin with Dr. Catherine Ibata-Arens. She is a professor and director of the Global Asian Studies Program at DePaul University, where she is focused currently on innovation and entrepreneurship in Asia, science and technology policy and women's economic empowerment. She has a book coming out soon entitled Beyond Technonationalism, Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia. And she will draw upon that work to talk to us about networked technonationalism. So I'm very pleased to welcome Catherine to the stage. Tell us about her work. Thank you. Is the mic working all right? It's okay. Good. Excellent. I'm just going to set up my little clock here so I can see my timing. Thank you to our kind host here, our Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, including our moderator, Mr. Jim Schoff. I'd like to also extend my deep gratitude to the Abe fellow sponsors, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, as well as the Social Science Research Council. The Social Science Research Council and the CGP are represented today by Mr. Moto Ono and Ms. Nicole Restrick-Levitt. And these are the two folks who make sure that we all are constituted as a group on our roadshow and that we get to where we need to go and that we have good synergy between all the members of the group and that we act responsibly and everything. And they are actually the power behind the scenes. So I'd like to give an extra special thanks to them and actually give them a round of applause for all the hard work that they've done. So again, I'm very honored to be here today sharing my insights with you from decades of research on Japan and other countries in Asia and the world about innovation and entrepreneurship. Before giving you some of the hard data from some of my recent research projects, I'd like to reflect on a time when I was a young postdoctoral researcher doing work, actually finishing up my dissertation work as a young Fulbright dissertation fellow to study entrepreneurs, leading small and medium-sized entrepreneurial firms in Japan in the late 1990s. And you may all know by now that was the first decade of what would become several, what have been called pejoratively lost decades. But anyhow, in September 1997, I arrived at Tokyo University at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology to be hosted by a now retired researcher by the name of Kodama Fumio Sensei. He is mostly known in Japan as one of the key architects of the concept and the policies related to university-industry partnerships known in Japanese as Sanga Kurienke. For two years as a Fulbright dissertation fellow, I, a fourth-generation Nikke from the Japanese Global Diaspora, I and my research were supported by mentors including Kodama Fumio Sensei who were not afraid to challenge the status quo and support junior women like me and in my case, a foreign one at that. This included introducing me to other mentors in their personal networks and the government officials, entrepreneurs, and others to interview for my research. I returned to this notion of diaspora a little bit later. In my 2005 Cambridge University Press Innovation Entrepreneurship in Japan, I found that certain entrepreneurial firms survived and prospered despite the then lost decade while their domestic competitors failed. Why? These successful high technology enterprises were able to engage in international strategic networks helping them to access markets and capital that were unavailable within the Japanese environment at the time. The same thing goes for the findings in my 2014 book chapter as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor special series on global women entrepreneurs in which I focused on successful women in China and Japan. A typical story of these entrepreneurial stellar outstanding women is that they did study abroad for a period of time. Maybe they worked for a multinational corporation but eventually returned home to their home country China or Japan and began working on their own either after working for a time in a Japanese or Chinese business but then decided eventually to become an entrepreneur. In this typical scenario of successful entrepreneurial women international networks compensate for lack of and weaknesses in domestic business networks in particular in terms of access and venture capital and other advice. In recent decades Chinese, Indian and other Asian entrepreneurs have been more successful at harnessing these international strategic networks than their Japanese counterparts. And I'll talk a little bit about why that is but let me reflect to the 20th century in Japan when Japan was in its high growth miracle economy period and Asian economies at the time emulated Japan in perfecting technologies in automobiles and electronics gaining global market share and eventually competing head to head with American industry. These countries including Japan often succeeded and then surpassed the US competition thanks in part to state policies targeting these sectors of the economy. These countries did so under a vision that has come to be called technonationalism. Technonationalism at the time was equated had equated national security with technology independence and from Western countries in particular. In my Die Sempai, Dick Samuels has written a book about 25 years ago on the subject of technonationalism in Japan in fact and it's intellectual lineage today. Fast forward to the 21st century the new competition over emerging sectors includes biomedicals. The biomedical industry is comprised mainly of pharmaceuticals but also medical devices. However compared to the 20th century the competitive landscape is more populated and it includes rising competition from larger economies such as China and India and like Japan these countries have made a strategic bet on biomedicals and have invested at the national level in stimulating innovation entrepreneurship at the technological frontier and I should add that the technological frontier is a lot different in the 21st century than we had in the 20th century where we had a very understandable map or an outline or a blueprint as to what the next technology threshold would be and therefore Japan and other countries were able to innovate incrementally on existing technology that had been imported from elsewhere. Entirely different scenario now. Biomedicals is a very new field. We haven't established any international standard for it. The example of a few weeks ago of the Chinese biomedical scientist who successfully implanted and the mother gave birth to two children who had been fertilized using the CRISPR technology supposedly to protect the child from AIDS but also that particular gene sequence is involved in the level of IQ so it's still a question up there as to exactly what the purpose of this gene manipulation was but that's an example of the current framework or the current scenario where we don't have international standards either in bioethics or in fact in where investment money should go. So with this in mind taking a look at why this is such a big opportunity if you look at the current global revenue for biomedicals it's already at $2 trillion. $2 trillion every year. The market itself is already upwards of $10 trillion. At the same time global healthcare expenditure on average is topping 10% of global GDP and it's expected to continue at that pace for several decades to come. To date more than half of global revenue in biomedicals has been generated in the United States and Europe. However, growth estimates by the big multinational consultancies such as Deloitte and McKinsey have anticipated that future growth will come in Asia and that market growth opportunity will be in Asian economies including Japan, including China, including India and Southeast Asia. Consequently the biomedical industry has become the next big thing for countries, for national governments, for investors, for private equity funds and for entrepreneurs. The promise of global market dominance is too difficult to ignore as well as the chance to set a generation of multilateral and multinational standards in healthcare. As a result of this fierce competition but also this market opportunity, national governments have turned to a new kind of technonationalism. What is new about this technonationalism? Well the key to the new technonationalism in Asia is harnessing international diaspora networks. Japan, for example, defines its diaspora or Nikkei as all Japanese people who have relocated overseas on a permanent basis including their descendants, like me. I am a fourth generation Japanese American. By the year 2014 Japan had over 3.5 million people designated as being part of their global diaspora. But let's take a look at India. They had 25 million by that time. China how much? 50 million in their global diaspora. And in fact by the time Japan had endured the end of its first lost decade in the early 2000s, both India and China had established entire government ministries whose entire mandate was to connect with their global diaspora talent but also to connect with foreign technologists and foreign entrepreneurs and foreign investors and foreign innovators as a whole. Even Singapore which explicitly has modeled its developmental policies and its state intervention and its economy after the Japanese success in the 20th century, even Singapore with a modest diaspora in its international environment of 200,000 has also established a national agency to engage not only with its diaspora but with foreigners in general. Viewing these trends to the lens of biomedical entrepreneurs it becomes clear how the new network technonationalism at the state level translates into innovation at the firm level. And I have a number of cases that I could share with you but I just wanna talk about one of them. Where is the? Talk about share one case with you. This is Ms. Karan Mazimdarsha. She is the top 20 list of one of the world's self-made women billionaires and this means that she started her company and became a billionaire not because she came from money not because she received money from a rich family member because she worked through her own sweat equity and built her multinational conglomerate through her own efforts. She is now not only India's richest self-made woman entrepreneur but she has a net worth as of 2018 of 3.3 billion US dollars. But she had modest beginnings. Ms. Karan Mazimdarsha was born in 1952 in Pune city in the state of Maharashtra in India. She learned the craft of brewmaking from her father a master brewmaker for Indian beers. Mazimdarsha studied to be a brewmaker like her father studying abroad like other women before her in Australia and became a certified brewmaker in her early 20s and returned home to seek employment in Indian breweries. However, unfortunately no Indian brewery would hire her in this very male dominated industry. She knew a lot about making beer and we know in the United States that men drink a lot of beer. I don't know if that means that you can make better beer if you're a man because you drink so much of it but in any case she chose a different path because she understood enzymes. So if you know anything about wine making or beer making you need a good base, a good enzyme base in order to stimulate the production of that fermentation. So she was approached in 1978 by an Irish entrepreneur who wanted to produce a digestive enzyme and she knew the technology and so they together started the company called Biocon. Initially producing the digestive enzyme Papain which is derived from the papaya fruit. Early on she recognized that Japanese had the highest quality of enzymes while the Japanese also produced these enzymes most efficiently with the least amount of waste. But ask yourself why is Biocon an example of techno nationalism? Well under then the regulations by the Indian government there was a 70-30 split meaning a domestic entrepreneur must hold 70% of the stock to that company and only 30% could be held by a foreigner and so she was protected for a time in her nascent entrepreneurial stage by government policy that was intended to build up domestic entrepreneurship even while receiving international money. But in any case back to the story about making beer and making enzymes and making nutraceuticals. She dispatched Biocon scientists a number of whom were diaspora returners like herself sent them to Japan to learn Kōjibe which is the mold spore based accelerant for producing sake and other wine products in Japan is she dispatched her technologists to learn and study Japanese enzyme production techniques. And from this study she and her diaspora returning talent team decided to pivot to biopharmaceuticals starting to make cholesterol reducing drugs and also insulin. And in fact Biocon was one of the first Indian companies to be able to produce insulin on their own with their own technology. Today Biocon is India's largest biopharmaceutical company with 10,000 employees. And yet she still found it a challenge to help stimulate more innovation entrepreneurship in India and she took many millions of dollars to establish the Biocon Park Special Economic Zone in 2006 in Bangalore. It is now one of the largest biotechnology parks in Asia. China's biomedical entrepreneurs and innovators have benefited similarly from national diaspora friendly policies Beijing Genomics Institute whose diaspora returnees were connected to the Human Genome Project which was funded by the NIH and the American government benefited as did other entrepreneur return rates such as Beijing. Due to time limits suffice it to say that China's new network techno nationalism is decades ahead of India's and its entrepreneurial ventures have benefited likewise in number and also in scale. Turning back to Japan, what has changed since the first lost decade of the 1990s? First and foremost it need not be said is the economic rise of China, its entrepreneurs, its innovators and the state interventionism. This has come in China and other economies with an increase in economic participation at all levels including it in high growth new firm ventures with global reach. In light of the rapid growth of China followed by India the inspiration for the research of my current book was my in fact frustration with the modest pace of change in Japan since my days at Tokyo University in the late 1990s. However in Japan in 2018 presently there is one bright spot and that is that Japanese political leaders and our leading bureaucrats have signaled that women who represent half of Japan's labor force must be better integrated into the Japanese economy in particular at the executive and board levels. This will of course benefit women. More importantly though this will be a potential solution to the skilled labor shortage caused by the aging society and low birth rates. Now of course this is not withstanding radical change in the immigration policy of Japan. Right now we're seeing a trend towards greater openness to diaspora town but also foreign town generally but it's happening at a slower pace than opening the executive suite to women for example. So is the lost decades finally transforming into opportunities for Japanese women and men maybe. Where could there be more progress in creating the system level pathways from Japan's what we know to be stellar innovation capacity to entrepreneurial ecosystem development. In my 2019 Stanford University Press book Beyond Technonationalism I explore the connections between innovation capacity and entrepreneurial ecosystem development in China, India, Japan and Singapore. In the book I propose a new framework of network techno nationalism to explain how countries including China and India have adopted this quasi open yet fundamentally techno nationalist stance in pursuing their own developmental goals. These countries benefit from harnessing global diaspora networks in making technology investments and entrepreneurial gains in the domestic economy. But what does this mean for Japan and the United States which is why most of you have come to this session on Monday afternoon here in Washington DC when I imagine you're all very, very busy. That is what must be done to improve Japan's entrepreneurial ecosystem and maintain the already good basis of entrepreneurial leadership at the technological frontier here in the United States. Some suggestions not surprisingly include building on existing international network connections. An example discussed in my Beyond Technonationalism in this regard is the US connections behind Shinya Yamanaka's research and we know to him to be the Nobel Prize awardee in induced pluripotent stem cell technologies. And Yamanaka has since taken that discovery and expanded on that and sponsored several hundred post-doctoral researchers at his lab at Kyoto University. However, that initial discovery was not made in Japan's innovation system. That discovery was in fact made in the United States at Gladstone Institute which is in San Francisco. But nevertheless he was able to bring that social capital and bring those connections back to his home environment as a returnee from the diaspora. Likewise, we see the trend in Singapore where Japanese entrepreneurs have been able to contribute to not only their own entrepreneurial creation but also the domestic developmental trend in the Singapore economy. Also in genomics and stem cells. And Chinese diaspora returnees are known affectionately in China as Haigui, a homonym for sea turtle but also returning. To date, the United States, we have been the beneficiary of global inward diaspora talent enhancing our American innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. For example, 60% of high technology, high growth, silicone valley startups are started by either Indian or Chinese or Taiwanese entrepreneurs. That's just one example of one micro level ecosystem in the United States that feeds into the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem here. And even if these returnees are these members of the diaspora after contributing to our economy in the United States return home, those network synergies still remain in place. So building on these international connections includes embracing international, foreign and diaspora networks. While Japan will never be able to compete with the Chinese and Indians on volume as the previous statistics on the number in the diaspora have shown, Japan can compete on quality. Japan still has many, many gems to be found in frontier science and technology, S&T. It has great innovation capacity as the example of the Kyoto University researchers and stem cells demonstrate. In the United States, global diaspora friendly immigration policies could and should build on past success. Together, Japan and the United States are poised to extend their already strong bilateral security, investment and trade partnership to a Pan-Asian and American innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem. I'd like to thank you for your time and point out that a number of my publications are available free for download at Research Gates and there are some discount cards to my book outside on the table. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Catherine. So we've kind of heard an initial version of networked bureaucratic science and technology budget innovation and now a different element of networked technonationalism. We're gonna move on to our next fellow. We're gonna jump in the program a little bit and invite Dr. Marie Anchoredoji to the stand, to the podium here. She's a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and her research focuses on key institutions and policies of Japan's capitalist system. She's currently investigating the political economy of entrepreneurship, venture capital and high-tech startups in Japan and she's gonna put some of this into perspective for us by looking at continuity and change in Japan's ecosystem for startup companies. So Marie, let me welcome you up here, thank you. Thank you to the Abe program and also to the Carnegie Endowment for having us here today. I'm just gonna briefly talk about my research related to venture capital-backed startup companies. Over the last 15 to 20 years, the rise of firms such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, together with research showing that new firms are key to job creation is pressuring many countries to try and change regulations and social norms to create healthy startup ecosystems. By doing so countries such as Japan but also South Korea, France and Germany are hoping to boost innovation and economic growth and create many new high-ranged jobs. So today I just wanna talk very briefly about what I mean by a startup ecosystem and some of the major changes that have occurred over the last 20 years resulting in what I would argue is a healthy ecosystem especially in the Tokyo area. So what do I mean by an ecosystem? I don't know how well you can read this but it includes a lot of actors, the government, venture capital firms, large companies, entrepreneurs, universities, lawyers, accountants and advisors and these actors and relationships among them impact a nation's ability to create new sustainable firms. An ecosystem is embedded in a complex set of social and political norms shaped by history. Due to network externalities, the bigger the ecosystem, the better but at least it needs a critical mass of experienced entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial, legal and accounting experts. Only 10% of startups succeed so the ecosystem needs to work in ways that do not punish failure too much. It must allow founders and venture capitalists to move quickly to new opportunities if their current venture fails. So in the late 1990s when Japan's economy was really struggling, their leaders began to look to startups to drive innovation, economic growth and job creation. They looked in many ways to Silicon Valley as a model but also for advice and funding. So now I'd just like to turn to a few of the changes in regulations, institutions and norms that have been made to create a functioning ecosystem. First in terms of the financial aspect of the ecosystem, new stock markets were created in the late 1990s which allowed unprofitable firms to go public through an IPO. So this allows entrepreneurs and investors to exit their investments. There were various tax policies especially angel tax benefits to individual angels and corporate angels. Initially these weren't used much actually, they were quite cumbersome but in the last few years they're being used a lot. And in fact, five to 6% of new venture funding is now coming from angels in Japan. There've been several positive changes in the sources and types of venture capital funding over the last 20 years. 20 years ago venture capital funding was basically alone. It is now purely equity. Most funding, VC funding 20 years ago came from VC firms allied with financial firms. Today that's down to about 60%. There's been a recent rise in independent VC firms in Japan. About 13% of Japanese VC firms are independent. This compares with about 84% in the US. And independent firms focus solely on financial returns. There's also been a recent boom in what we call CVC or corporate venture capital in Japan. These are funds established by old line Japanese companies Hitachi, Fujitsu, Nikon and the like. About 80% of VC deals in Japan today involve corporate venture capital. Compared to about 23% of deals in the United States. And there's been an overall increase in funding since the market really plummeted in 2009. It's bounced back to about $1.4 billion in venture capital funding in 2016. But the absolute amount of venture capital in Japan is very small compared to the United States. It's also relatively low as a percentage of GDP but is quite similar to France and Germany as a percentage of GDP. One last change, 20 years ago most VC funding in Japan went to very less risky later stage firms about ready to go through an IPO. Now the majority of venture capital funding goes to seed and early stage firms. There's also been great efforts to strengthen the labor part of the ecosystem to sort of reduce barriers to entrepreneurship. So state and business leaders are trying to encourage Japanese youth to think more about becoming entrepreneurs or at least working for startups. But social norms do still work somewhat against this. For example, educated Japanese still prefer the security of a large firm. Though less than in the past there is still some stigma against failure. Although actually graduates of top Japanese universities can afford to fail now because there are enough firms, Rakuten, SoftBank, foreign firms that will hire them even if they fail. Since 2006 limited liability partnerships and companies have been allowed and so this allowed managers and investors to reduce the risk of getting involved in startups. In the mid 2000s bankruptcy law and various other laws were changed making bankruptcy much easier, quicker and cheaper and making it easier to reorganize a startup to survive. This reduces disincentives to entrepreneurship. Now personal guarantees and stock buybacks have long discouraged entrepreneurs but they have been improved recently. Until recently actually most founders of Japanese firms had to give a personal guarantee for loans and even sometimes for venture capital. But these guarantees are less common today because Prime Minister Abe in 2014 fought with the banks to get rid of the requirement of these personal guarantees. But actually the banks opposed Abe. So in the end the personal guarantees are prohibited in principle but there are exceptions. This is a very Japanese way of compromising and the exceptions are when a founder's assets and his firm's assets are mixed together which is of course fairly common. But still due to Abe's strong efforts many people had their guarantees nullified, many received new loans without guarantees. So that has been great progress. Founders can also be pressured to buy back equity if a venture fails. In these agreements founders commit to buying back stock from the VC firm at cost. If for example an IPO doesn't occur in a specific time or if it doesn't lead to a specific payout. Obviously powerful entrepreneurs can delete these clauses from their contracts but most people cannot. But just in the last year or two entrepreneurs are collectively pushing back against VC firms that require these buybacks. And in several cases VC firms have been willing to take less than a full buyback. The labor part of the ecosystem is also being enhanced by Japan's move very slowly but I think steadily towards opening up to more highly educated foreigners. About half of Silicon Valley startups as Catherine said are created by foreign born people so having more immigrants would clearly help Japan. It's actually quite easy now for educated foreigners to get visas to even become a permanent resident in Japan and new companies no longer require a Japanese citizen on their board. So yes language is a barrier it will be for a long time but there are better opportunities today for foreign entrepreneurs than there have ever been before. Stock options have also increasingly motivated entrepreneurs in Japan. They've been allowed for about 20 years but really have only been used for about the last five years. There's recently been an expanded role of large firms and universities in the startup ecosystem. Large companies are moving towards open innovation. Actually they don't want to change but they know now that they can no longer afford to do everything within their corporate group. So this means they are beginning to collaborate more with new firms and buy their products.  Such exits by acquisition by a large company increased from zero in 2013 to about 14% of exits in 2016. Large firms buying new ventures gives founders and investors another new exit option beyond simply an IPL. Large firms are beginning to think about other corporate practices and are trying to change them. For example, they're trying to speed up decision making. They're also beginning to realize that rotating managers every few years hurts the quality of decisions and makes it such that no one is really responsible for their decisions because they've moved on before the results are even clear. So a few VC firms just in the last year or so have decided not to rotate their managers in and out from the head company. Every few years they're allowing them to become VC experts and even to make financial benefit from their investment decisions. Large firms are also trying to figure out, this is a huge problem in Japan, how to better integrate mid-career people into their seniority system. If you're gonna buy a new venture, you're gonna have to figure out how to integrate those people and so they need to figure out a way to make this a smoother process in order to encourage more acquisitions. As for universities, the way Yamason mentioned, there were several reforms between 1998 and 2004 that really transformed the role of the university and the ecosystem. It allowed universities to establish technology licensing offices which help universities and professors with their patents and marketing and licensing of technology for them. Also allows professors and universities to own technology that they develop with state funding. Also professors can now make extra compensation. They can consult for and create new firms. So the cutback in money that William Yamason mentioned is one of the reason why we're now seeing universities become much greater creators of new firms over the last 10 to 15 years. And in fact, Prime Minister Abe is trying to stimulate further the role of the university in startups. Just recently he injected about one billion US dollars into four large venture capital funds at national universities, four national universities. There have been some criticism of these funds but it's way too early to conclude about their success or failure. But many experts in Japan are happy that this much money is being injected into the ecosystem. But still, most research on startups suggests that governments are best at creating the environment for entrepreneurship. That when they get involved with specific firms they tend to fail. So as you can see from what I've already talked about the government has changed its attitudes and policies quite a bit but I just wanna mention that there are also hundreds of other new programs under Prime Minister Abe to encourage entrepreneurship. Most of them have quite small budgets and even government officials admit that some of them are redundant and they're kind of done in a sort of scatter shot approach. But still, all the experts I talked to in Japan they are very happy in general with the government's efforts since the late 1990s but especially Prime Minister Abe has made a lot of policies to try and make Japan a startup nation. So in conclusion, there have been many significant structural reforms and changes in policies and social norms over the last 20 years that have resulted in a healthy ecosystem at least in the Tokyo area. Japan's ecosystem, startup ecosystem today has a regulatory framework that is quite similar to that of the US at least on paper. Successful startups from Rakuten and DNA, Green Line, Mercari and many other relatively new firms. These successful startups are now sowing the seeds of more successful ventures, triggering a virtuous cycle. Indeed, there are increasing numbers of successful entrepreneurs who have become major role models, angels and mentors. But despite these changes, further progress in creating a more vibrant ecosystem is being hampered somewhat by the continuity of some of the social norms that I mentioned such as preference to work for a large firm or preference of corporations for long-term relationships. Also, progress is impeded because there's only a small pool of young Japanese and good ideas. My research thus far suggests that the government, entrepreneurs and the VC industry are the ones that are the main promoters of dramatic reforms and big business and social norms have resisted change somewhat making it slow and incremental. It took Silicon Valley many decades to create a strong ecosystem and they received significant support from the US defense industry. Only time is gonna tell us how successful Japan's ecosystem will be, but I think it has the fundamental ingredients to succeed and it's actually quite comparable to other nations that started about two decades ago to try and build an ecosystem like South Korea, France and Germany. The efforts to create a healthy ecosystem I think also show that at least in the area of venture capital-backed high-tech startups Japan has been successful in gradually shifting from a more coordinated market economy to one with institutions and policies characteristic more of what we would call a liberal market economy. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marie. You really added a lot of richness to this, little by little we're getting deeper and deeper into the changes going on. Oh, sorry, okay. We're just gonna switch a computer out for our final presenter, Dr. Masaru Yarime, who is a associate professor in the division of Public Policy at Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on science, technology and innovation policy with a particular interest in exploring the structure, functions and evolution of innovation systems for sustainability. He has contributed to various international initiatives including the UN Environment Program, Finance Initiative and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group on Mitigation, among others and he will talk to us about data-driven innovation and then after that we'll have a chance for a little group discussion, some audience participation and then we'll start our reception after that. But let me welcome our final Abe fellow today, Professor Yarime. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for your kind introduction. My name is Masaru Yarime. Currently I'm working at the division of Public Policy in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and I also have affiliation with the University of London and also University of Tokyo and also Japan International Cooperation Agency, Research Institute in Tokyo. So somehow I have been working on this innovation policy with a particular focus on energy, environment and sustainability. And today I'm going to talk a little bit about the implication of data-driven innovation for policy and strategic issues in the context of global competition and also collaboration. Well, probably you already know that this big data AI and IoT, these terms appear almost every day on newspapers and reports. So, and also as Professor Yarime mentioned, in achieving this society 5.0, this data-driven innovation is particularly important. So I think challenge to Japan and also to US and other countries in the world is to how to encourage innovation, but at the same time how to somehow maintain the system so that we can somehow appreciate the values like privacy and the social security. So data-driven innovation, this is just taken from a report published by OECD some years ago. So basically we have, we need to get data and then collect it and then manage it and then get something out of it by using AI data analytics and then use it for decision-making and then make a creation and creating a value society. So basically there are three components in making data-driven innovation, one is data, so availability, a lot of data from different sources which are not necessarily available in the past and then accessibility, who can have access to this data and then obviously the quantity and the quality which is increasingly important for this big data-age based on AI. So open data is a very important topic globally speaking and particularly the internet of things is very important in collecting a lot of data available. So that is one component and the second component is data science which is about how to deal with this data, what we can get out of this data. So this machine learning obviously particularly important but generally speaking this AI has its own intelligence is a very important role in this data science. And then the third one is domain expertise which is about the sector-specific knowledge expertise and which involves in many cases the physical systems and obviously in the customer Japan that manufacturing sector has been relatively strong. So how we can deal with this little advantage in manufacturing to stimulate innovation, data-driven innovation in the future. So this is I think particularly important for the strategic making in the future in Japan. So IoT first, there are many layers like sensors, we are getting data and then network communications and then putting together as a platform and then we use them for applications in many different areas. So well, there are many ways to try to define the boundaries of IoT but this is just one paper which has been published very recently to try to look at IoT related patents. So this is just a country based numbers the numbers and then US and China, Japan and then South Korea and then Sweden. So these are major countries with regard to IoT patent applications. And this is a evolution of patent applications of five countries. And as you see, the red one is China which is really increasing its applications and then Japan is the green. So which is somehow stable but in recent years try to increase a little bit. So as you can see this now the US and China, Japan, the South Korea and Sweden. So these are really the major layers. And then this is specialization which is somehow linked to this revealed or comparative advantage in the sense that to what extent that this IoT area is specialized in the whole portfolio of patent applications of each country. So China somehow try to increase this IoT area. And then it's surprising in the sense that Japan's relative specialization on IoT seems to be declining in recent years. And if you look at the main companies, applicants in IoT, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Qualcomm, DT, Samsung, Intel, Xemens and then the Philips. And then we have these Japanese companies like Panasonic, entity.com, and then NEC, Fujitsu. So relatively speaking, very established Japanese manufacturing companies relatively strongly applying patents for IoT related areas. Then this is just some of the companies, top five companies with got IoT applications. You see this, particularly Chinese, Huawei and NGP, they are really increasing recently. And then AI papers. The China, well now we have come to the second stage of how to deal with data. So collect data and then how to get something out of data. And then this AI, this China and the US, they are really strong in this area in the UK, Japan and Germany and India. Then this, the trends in paper publications in this area and then the China is really aggressively increasing this AI papers. And then this is more about quality, in a sense of the highest output of articles like in top papers in AI. And then the US and China, again they are really leading countries in this area. So, well then we have just China, US and Japan and looking at the patents data and then the IBM, Microsoft and then Samsung and then the China, the state grid company and Canon, Sony, NAC. So relatively speaking, Japanese companies, particularly very established big companies in electronics, they are ready to be strong in this area. But papers, which mean the scientific publication in AI is really somehow at least we've got the number of publications and that's some kind of quality of publications it's lagging behind the US and China. And then the talents, which is based on the number of authors and also patents inventors and then put them together in the US, China and then India. They are really relatively speaking, large pool of talents on AI. And then this is a number of AI related enterprises and the US has many companies and enterprises and then China, the UK. And then if you look at the Japan, it's at least in this paper, this is 40. So, however we have a relatively well established big companies, they are strong, they have expertise knowledge. But then that probably not so many startups, new entrants coming to this, which is somehow consistent with the previous speaker mentioned about this, the startups. So this is one of the key challenges facing the Japanese industry in data regulation. But then if you come to data regulation, as you know, this Google, Baidu and all these search engines, platforms and then we have e-commerce, Amazon and then Alibaba and the others. They were initially based on the cyber space, the cyber data. But then it's really coming to integrating cyber physical systems which is also mentioned by Professor Weyama in achieving this society 5.0. So there's challenges that how to integrate this physical systems is cyber. And then probably the Japan could have some advantage in the sense that probably it's not really easy to compete with all these big players in fairly physical space like Google, Amazon and Baidu, Tencento, Alibaba and others. But if you move into this cyber physical area, then we could, the Japan could utilize this strength of the manufacturing sector. And this is just one example of Komatsu. They have this, what is called ComTrack system. Some of all the construction machineries are tracked by, traced by the GPS and then they know exactly what the situation is, whether it's working or not. So you can also see, you can monitor and also manage all this operation. But at the same time, you can get the data about where this mining activity is going on or construction is going on, which mean that the kind of indicator of economic activities. So you can use that kind of knowledge by putting all this data into this construction machineries. And then they are now moving into a kind of platform for smart construction. So they are linking to this machinery data and then putting all this labor, workers data and then environmental data and then put allowing other companies to join this one. So it's a kind of platform in the construction area. So perhaps this kind of example might be one area where Japanese companies can utilize relative strength in the manufacturing sector. And then come to cities. As Professor Weyama mentioned, that this Society 510 really requires all this data getting from the physical space, the cities. So how we can really do this experiment, utilizing what is called living laboratories and so that we can test it and then get feedback from users and then improve it. So this is really actually what's going on with Google, trying to create a city in Toronto and then Alibaba City Brain in Hangzhou. So in that sense that Japan can really try to utilize its experience of introducing and implementing smart communities in the past few years. So by doing it, it's possible to address many societal challenges, which is also mentioned in Society 510, the resilience against disasters and the use of CO2 emissions and then the accessibility to aging populations and all these things could be possible, possibly addressed by using these smart cities. So this is just one study I have done with my colleagues with regard to the innovation system of smart cities comparing between Japan and the US and on the left hand side you see the Japanese case. It's more knowledge domains, which is focusing more on TV and community energy systems and home appliances or application areas. The legacy US on the right hand side, it's more about the smart grid, smart meters, communication systems. And then if you look at actors, what kind of actors involved in a project on smart cities, again on the left hand side in Japan, it's relatively concentrated and various types of players are there. And then in the US it's more dispersed and then you see many startups and new entrants are coming into this area. So this is just some of the actors, you see some of the big companies like Hitachi, Toshiba and also funding agency, NEDO, others. And in the US you see some smart meters, vendor companies and also some of the utilities and others. So if you talk about this smart cities, this idea of smart cities, we use the same word, but then how they are emerging in a way and how they are designed and then what kind of players are entering this area are quite different. So in the case of Japan it's heavily influenced by traditional engineering companies in the energy sector and then they are moving into this smart city. But in the case of the US it's more about ICT driven new companies coming into this area. So I'm now trying to look at what China is going to do in this area. And then this is just the beginning of our project with my Chinese colleagues in Hong Kong and mainland China. If you look at the Chinese case, you see particularly the surveillance as you can imagine, surveillance is very emphasized in Chinese smart cities. And then obviously you can imagine the face recognition and also voice recognition. These technologies are very emphasized and then you see many startups like iFlyTech and also SenseTime and others. So the idea of smart city really reflects a different kind of industrial structure and also strength in each country. And then just looking at the patents on smart city, they see all these companies and then actually many of them are based in what is called Greater Bay Area, which is Hollywood Delta. So I'm now actually trying to do some research with regard to Greater Bay Area in the system and this is just a number of patent applications. And then you see Tokyo, Tokyo-Hama cluster is really big, probably because many of the companies have headquarters in Tokyo. And then you see the Shenzhen Hong Kong cluster is also actually very, very big cluster already. Well, partly because of the big companies like DTE and Huawei are located in Shenzhen. So if you look at the patent applications in China, then Shenzhen and Guangzhou combine together account for half of the Chinese international patent applications. So they are really getting active in this area with regard to innovation. And then Unicons, I think a previous speaker also mentioned that you see many U.S., China. And then Japan, some have tried to increase the Unicons and you see the Merukali and also the preferred networks and these are two companies which are conserved to be with this one. But then the challenge is how to increase all this Unicons and they measure investment and Japan still has a relatively small amount of venture investment by market. So the challenge is how we can really encourage more investment in this area. So Japan had all this project on Sumatsumi in different locations, utilizing different characteristics, big cities and also small cities and science parks and that is. So I think it's very important to try to encourage this kind of different localized initiatives for encouraging the new technologies tested and experimented by the users. So I think, and then the challenge is that the standardizations, sorry for skipping some of the slides but I thought it's important to put some more time available for the questions. So another challenge is that standardization because now there are so many IoT areas linked together so but then each of them has its own standard so then how to coordinate in this area is also a big challenge which also requires international cooperation and collaboration like ISO. And then that sending all these people to ISO technical committees, it's also a big challenge and as you see that China is really trying to get engaged in these international activities for standardization. So I think it's also important to try to engage in these kind of international activities. And then the data challenge and as you know this data kind of data protectionism is emerging in many parts of the world and particularly in the case of China you really cannot get data out of the country. So that is really a big challenge and then how in a way international community can try to create kind of atmosphere where the data could be relatively freely available and then that we can use all this data for the benefit of the whole, the global community. So I think that would be a big challenge. So how to convince all these countries which are not necessarily willing to open the data is something that we need to think about in the future. So all this open data issue, ownership, availability, accessibility and then privacy, security and all these issues are still there. So to the rest of this one I think the Japanese government is trying to make it possible to utilize those data collected from consumers after anonymization by creating our task of information bank which is currently discussed in business and also the government. So that would be one thing which might be very interesting case or institutional environment where you can utilize the data. So then coming to this smart city or super city produced recently by the Japanese government. So how to combine this regulatory sandbox for stimulating innovation through this smart city initiatives and then the initially FinTech was the target for this one and then that increasingly considered like Singapore they introduced this regulatory sandbox for energy sector. So then probably we could expand it into the whole city so that we can test all these new technologies although we need to think about these risks and also some of the negative impacts of these new technologies but then probably we need to take bold steps to try to allow all these new technologies to be tested by getting the stakeholders involved. So these are the, I think the challenges and then one thing is how we can really do it for the Japanese industry with regard to this stimulating innovation and particularly in the context of international collaboration and competition. So in that sense, I think US China has this clean energy research center agreed between Xi Jinping and former President Obama and then they identify some of the key areas with this scheme for intellectual property rights. So government level agreement, how they can deal with this intellectual property rights and then how to deal with this dispute with regard to IP intellectual property rights. So perhaps it might be possible to introduce such a scheme let's say between Japan and China and so that particularly the small media enterprises can also participate in this international activities because they don't have these expertise. So the US China activities but this is one case for low carbon building in Shenzhen and they have this site together and then they have all these partners coming from both countries and then they try to do it at this open testing platform so that, so perhaps Japan can also think about doing something small initially and then learning all this experience of dealing with data, intellectual property rights and then let's see if possible we can expand into other areas. So this could be a kind of model for international cooperation for smart cities or super cities in the global context. So then, sorry, this is the final one. Recently Japanese manufacturing companies now working with the Chinese AI startups in this case Honda and Sennstein working together so using Honda's expertise on automobile and then Sennstein's expertise on AI so that how all this manufacturing plus AI could be able to produce something useful for the two sides. And then this is Eon and also Deep Blue which is a kind of supported by Alibaba. Again, this is the commerce and also AI companies working together. And then recently the Japan China the auto industries joined somehow agreed to work together with the kind of self-driving autonomous vehicles including standardization. And then just a few months ago Prime Minister Wei and Xi Jinping somehow agreed to launch new dialogue of intellectual property rights also including this AI and autonomous vehicle. So somehow there are some examples in this international cooperation but obviously there are many, many challenges but probably it's really good, important to try to start something from something small and then try to learn and then getting feedback lessons and then to see whether it's possible to extend or not. So this is just kind of I just mentioned some of the recent examples in this area but I really hope to receive a comment suggestion from the audience on this topic. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Yari Mei. We don't have a whole lot of time left but I would like to ask our panelists just to come up and we'll take a couple of questions from the audience. I had a whole bunch of questions myself but luckily we do have our reception starting from 5.30 and everyone will be there so you'll have a chance to follow up with some questions and continue the dialogue but please let me invite our, so we'll go kind of in descending order from the presentations. So Catherine at the far left there and then no, no, you go at the end. It's just the way your mics are all set up and then Professor Yari Mei and Guiyama. They can turn it off. We only have a couple of minutes for your presentations and you've given us a lot to consider and think about. My initial question and I had a few different questions I wanna ask but I'm gonna give the audience a chance to ask a question or two as well but putting it in a US-Japan context. We've seen examples of kind of bottom up US-Japan collaboration, entrepreneurship, at least in the area of basic science and certainly on the medical field resulted in some Nobel Prizes. To what extent is it possible to kind of introduce the alliance component into some of these areas that you're talking about today in terms of really stimulating innovation capacity, collaborating in that realm whether it's university oriented or research institute oriented or is this, there is so much competition and data itself is becoming a bit of a currency in international competition as well. So it seems that there are forces that are pushing us together as allies in this realm trying to collaborate and get more out of our work, out of our research and investment from a government budget perspective but all kinds of competitive forces and cultural and kind of institutional challenges and barriers that would make that more difficult and I just wonder if anyone had any thoughts about where does the alliance fit into this based on the work that you've done or what you've been thinking about? About some sort of issues now. Barriers that has been hindered any sort of international collaboration between the scientists, the both of those countries but if the in my generation and many, many researchers want to do a role, even if somebody want to get a PhD from any field or even after they finish a PhD in Japanese universities they want to go abroad, get into the kind of internal laboratory of any sort of researchers and then socialize with the top-run high researchers in the United States and go back to Japan and that's kind of a feedback process of kind of the international exchange of the seas and ideas. So the problem we face right now is the younger generation that don't want to go abroad and that's just serious problem, you know? They kind of became so much a discoverer so they're just concerned about what's gonna happen after get a PhD or what to finish that post-op in the United States and come back, where is that post for there? That's just serious problem for us. So we are now making some sort of the scheme to encourage the younger people to go abroad or make some sort of collaboration with foreign excellent researchers. So to get into the mafia of the excellent researchers not only in the United States but also in the EU. Now EU actually approach us so much why don't you make a collaboration more and more of that? Because we are there, they are gonna provide any sort of research money to even to the Japanese researchers and the scientists that want to come to EU that's gonna be quite interesting and fascinating, you know, the proposal for us. So we wanna encourage that kind of system by support, financially supporting to the younger students actually. So I'd like to say something about the bilateral security partnership. Some years ago I was a Japan Policy Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here down the road. And there were a number of folks working on interoperability in cybersecurity. And I think that is a perfect example of where the new technology opportunity for innovation entrepreneurship in Japan and the bilateral security partnership between Japan and the United States really connects very well in terms of both our strategic interest but also our economic development and growth interest in connecting up the innovation capacity to an entrepreneurial ecosystem because it kills two birds with one stone as we would say, you know, it solidifies the interoperability between the communication systems for our national security purposes but also acts as a bulwark against other countries that may have already made advances. I'll just not mention anyone in particular but other countries that may have made advances in terms of their cybersecurity and could become a direct threat to American and Japanese strategic interest in the world. Thank you. If there are no other comments on this particular question, let's open it up and take a couple of questions. I have one here and then I'll go to the back there. We'll try to squeeze in what we can. I'm just, okay, first of all I want to congratulate Japan on its win of expo 2025. Okay, the question I have is you're talking about, you know, AI and all that stuff in the surveillance in China. So the question is, is Japan looking to use, I gotta say, advance the technology used in China for the surveillance and suppression and punishment of dissidents? Or is the technology Japan looking to develop consistent with democratic principles?  No, thank you. Now there's definitely a lot of ethical questions in this whole realm of especially data-driven and government collection and then a hand in the back there. Thank you all for your presentations. I also wanted to follow up. My question is about the World Expo in Osaka. How you see climate change and resiliency to climate change being showcased in the future of the city, I think, whatever the theme is under the World Expo 2025. I believe it's future city. And as the UN's climate talks are ongoing right now, I think it might be timely to just look into that. Thank you. Thank you. Some big questions, ethical issues, and climate change as well. Does anyone on the panel wanna tackle one of those issues? I think one of somebody wants to take the first one. I think somebody wants to take the first one. Jump right in, whichever one you wanna start with. So in terms of the World Expo, we actually had a really interesting conversation at dinner last night. We've been on a road show for the last week. We started these panels in Atlanta at Georgia Tech this past weekend. But we were talking last night about these questions, and that is where can Japan establish greater leadership based upon, again, its stellar innovation capacity and the sustainable development goals is one area where, and this is a personal opinion based upon my new research project on intellectual property rights and the protection and conservation of plant and medicinal and biodiversity. Japan has really been at the forefront. They're the only country that put up the money, for example, $2 billion to support, not just the word and the signaling of the Nagoya Protocol on the protection and conservation of biological resources, but also $2 billion US dollars to create what is called the Japan Biodiversity Fund, which has stimulated a lot of research, but also person-to-person connections on the idea of sustainability. And so I think it's a wonderful opportunity. Again, I'm not on the host committee in Osaka 2025, but I would recommend that that would be a wonderful way to really showcase Japan's leadership in this very important multilateral question for the whole world. What are the, in the recently published integrated innovation strategy, we already talks about how important SDG goal is gonna be the future for society. I think Japan is the first country in the world to discuss about the roadmap to achieve the SDG goals by way of STI policies. So we call this an STI for SDGs. This is kind of a fundamentally new one. Now, so that the SDG idea is quite similar to the concept of society 5.0, because society 5.0 argue that we need to include all of the people, not only Japan, but also the whole country is going to be made more happier, more, you know, the wealthier, and also more custom to the current developing situation of the science and technology. We should share all sorts of benefit, which is originated from science and technology. It's kind of a goal of society 5.0. It's quite similar to the goal of an SDG. So we already started up to discuss how to achieve the goals, 70 goals of society 5.0 SDGs in all of the agencies, including universities. For example, University of Tokyo, University of Kyoto is already discussed what kind of the creativity within the university can be contributed to the goals, goal achievement, the SDGs. For example, which department, which, you know, the engineer department, the medical department, et cetera, have been discussed about what kind of the technology they can provide to the achievement of the SDG. So that kind of very much bottom-up discussion already started in Japan. I think it's very much, you know, the firm foundation for the Japanese, the future society. And also probably the Osaka in 2020 is going to pick up these kind of ideas to make the final achievement of the SDG goal or society 5.0 to be, you know, widely popularizing in the world, I guess. That is the best chance for us to deal with that, yeah. And just to keep on the Osaka theme, I guess I'll address briefly the ethics question. You know, I think next year, Osaka will be hosting the G20. And to me, the G20 is the most legitimate forum for trying to address or at least help drive some consensus on some of these governance issues related to technological development. And it's not gonna be the last word on this, but it seems that there's an opportunity for coalition building among the countries that are at the forefront of developing some of these technologies. And anything that the G20 endorses as a standard or as a direction, I think carries a lot of weight. So that's potentially one area where that could be discussed. I'm sorry, we didn't manage our time so effectively here today, that's my responsibility as moderator. But we do have an opportunity to continue the conversation over a glass of wine or a beer downstairs. It'll be in the back, down the stairs, I believe is where our reception will be. Linda, do you wanna give us a final word of... Well, I'll give you a chance here to... Basically, thank you, particularly to the Carnegie and Downwoods for interacting with us. For all of you for coming to this interview, our speakers, that seems important to me. Look forward to talking to you all with you this evening. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.