 So this is the final session of the afternoon, and we're taking a slightly different tack, but on the whole, I hope this is going to be a more optimistic session of the day. And the earlier ones. Although, you know, there are some tough questions even here, but on the whole, upbeat. And the plan for the session is that I'm going to invite each of the speakers up to give their presentation and then they will go back and sit so they can see other people's slides. When they're all done, we'll bring them all up here, and we're going to then have a little bit of structured conversation. I have some questions to pose to the speakers, and then we will open up for questions from the audience. And I wanted to start by making some remarks about this session. We called it the Innovation Agenda. We played with words here. We thought about calling it Innovation Culture in Japan. And I think you'll see why as we go along. But in fact, when I first proposed the idea for this panel, we had between us as organisers some discussion about whether this was really a good topic for the update. And some of my co-organisers initially were worried that this was just really one of those words that is bandied around but didn't have much meaning. So it's kind of become a convenient label for some political posturing without much substance. Both of our countries, Australia and Japan, have policy documents and statements about national innovation agendas. But those documents are often discursive. They can ramble a bit. They can sometimes be used to allow governments to claim credit for initiatives that the private sector is doing anyway and thereby make themselves look as if they're on trend and in control and really it's something else happening altogether. And then at the same time the governments turn around and criticise industry and universities for not doing enough in this space. And we all get a bit tired of the conversation generally. So we did sort of ask ourselves, what's the real issue here? Is there something that we want to be talking about as academics and as practitioners? So we did come to the view that there is an important question here. And as you've heard from Sekino Sun and in the opening remarks from Shiro, both countries face a current and future productivity challenge. We both have to address how to raise growth, how to improve economic prosperity. And the challenge is I think at least twofold. One is simply to get back to where we were before the global financial crisis. When productivity performance, although it has been slowing since its peak period in the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, it was still at that time better than it is now. And then the other challenge is how to move forward into the fourth industrial revolution and not to be left behind in an era of artificial intelligence, the internet of things and big data. What did those things mean for our economies and are we poised to respond to those challenges? So we put together a panel with diverse backgrounds to think about these questions from different points of view. So we have on the panel a perspective from economics. We have educators in entrepreneurship and in the public understanding of science. And we have a distinguished engineer who has himself had a long career of collaboration with Japanese scientists. And I want to introduce the speakers. You have their bios in front of you. But just to remind you, we have Professor Riko Aoki who is commissioner at the Fair Trade Commission and was before that an academic economist and a university executive administrator. And her research interests include innovation, product differentiation and the law on economics of intellectual property. So she has a unique perspective now as a policymaker or as a regulator in the competition space with that background to bring that perspective to the question. Josh Flannery is from the University of New South Wales and has an interesting role in which he is working in the division of enterprise there and has his own startup business or program through which he is training entrepreneurs. And if you think that you can't train entrepreneurs and that they are somehow bored rather than bred then I think you will be interested to see what Josh has to say. But he also has a very long connection of working with Japan and understands the entrepreneurship culture in Japan and will help us to understand where entrepreneurship comes from in Japan and how it differs from Australia. We also have Graham Durant who is the director of Questacon and any of you who live in Canberra and all the Australians in the audience I hope know about Questacon and many of the Japanese in the audience will also know about Questacon. Graham will tell you more about that but he is the director there and Questacon's mission is of course partly around science education. He originally trained as a geologist at the University of Wales and spent time in Glasgow before he came to Australia so he has a distinguished career as a researcher as well. And then we have Brian Anderson, Professor Brian Anderson from the ANU who is momentarily on the wrong page here sorry who is a marriages professor in the research school of engineering here at the ANU and is currently collaborating on a project with Japanese scholars on the operation of formations of drones and I'm not sure that he has planned to tell us much about that project in his presentation but I'm sure somebody will ask him about it because it's fascinating. Professor Anderson joined the ANU in 1981 as its first engineering professor and has been in many senior positions in the university but he has also held positions in a number of other universities and has been recognised by both the Australian and the Japanese governments with awards recognising his contribution to both countries. So that's who is going to speak and I'm going to say a little bit about some questions that I posed to the panel when I was asking them to think about the topic. So I've asked them to think about some things that puzzle me about Japanese innovation and those questions were that I think when we think of Japan and innovation we think of a number of apparently conflicting impressions so we all think of Japan as having given the world many important innovations we think of it as being a place that invents things, brings them to market develops fabulous computers and consumer products all kinds of interesting gadgets that we all like to use it ranks very highly in most indexes of innovation there are a number of global indexes that try to rank countries by their innovativeness and Japan always ranks highly in those but it is also seen as a country that is not entrepreneurial where people are not willing to take risks people and companies particularly are not willing to take risks we've heard in the course of the day the observation that it's hard to start companies up and that there are not, there isn't that enthusiasm for having a go making a start up, doing what it takes to get the small and medium enterprise sector really mooring ahead with productive new developments in academic terms Japan has a very large number of researchers it has a very high share of global publications in academic output terms although its share in the world is dropping as China grows in size the number of Nobel prizes coming from Japan has increased very rapidly actually in the last 10 years the number of Nobel prizes has been much higher than in the previous 10 year period so we have a kind of puzzle here is this a dynamic innovative inventive kind of society and economy or is it one in which there is no appetite to take risks to invent to go out on a limb and try and do something new and I would like to see if we can unpack some of the cultural, regulatory, political factors that influence the activity in both directions influence the outcomes in both directions and I want also to ask some questions about whether doing science in Japan and doing academic discovery and research is different is there a different culture of scientific enquiry in Japan does that lie at the heart of some of these puzzles so I'm going to leave my introduction there and begin by inviting Reiko Aoki to come and speak on her subject thanks so I should use this thank you very much for the introduction I'd also like to thank Jenny for inviting me to participate in this panel and also for the update, the whole event it's been an honour to meet people like Professor Drysdale that I've heard about but I've never had the opportunity to meet and everything has been a very intriguing and stimulating learning experience for me and I hope I can contribute something to the discussion about innovation through my expertise I should say although now I work for the Japan Fair Trade Commission I'm here as an economist mostly and someone who's dabbled a bit in economics of innovation so what I'll do is start by answering the four questions that were posed by Jenny for starters and they're there so the first question how do policy and regulation on competitive industry behaviour by firms affect their performance and this is a very good question we have people esconded to the JFTC from Meti for instance but they're very sceptical about how competition could hinder innovation but that's not true because this is a relationship between competition and policy and innovation first of all competition is necessary for innovation first of all firms with market power i.e. like a monopolist in the product market like incentive to innovate compared to competitive firms because they have so much to profit to begin with why should they bother innovating whereas if you're an outsider you have no profits so getting into the market with a new product and early monopolizing the market is a very very attractive proposition that is who is more hungry in combat or a startup and the talking too loud which often happens this affect that monopolist that less incentive is called the replacement effect because for a monopolist it's just replacing a monopoly profit there's also another side to the competition and that's the competition in technology itself so instead of the product market you think of the technology market and competition technology market itself is very important before they come into the product market so competition for a new drug on pharmaceutical companies for instance is very important all the competition takes place before the product reaches the market second question how does that affect their willingness to innovate I hope I convinced you with the previous slide that the answer is yes it does affect their willingness to innovate and the next question does it affect the ease of entry for new firms this is where the GFG is the Fair Trade Commission which is like the ACCC in Australia does it has three pillars for implementing the anti-monopoly policy and first is the private watching out for private monopolization and unreasonable restraint of trade and this refers to the explanation that's given to you there in the orange box I don't know how many of you are can I highlight this? so I think some of you would be familiar with some of the terms here things like cartels, price fixing, bid reading would be things that the the anti-competitive authority would be concerned about that can hinder competition second pillar is unfair trade practices and this would include things like resell price maintenance trading on exclusive terms restricting where a subcontract a franchisee for instance is able to sell geographic restrictions or whether you can sell the internet versus the brick and mortar store those would be vertical restraints the third would be made merger regulation preventing monopolization of the market and like A-A-CCC JFTC overuse permission that firms can merge or not so does it affect the ease of entry for new firms? yes, it's all the three pillars by which the JFTC guarantees ease of entry for new firms and the last question how is this policy changing? and this I'd like to introduce recent cases that the JFTC has been involved in and also what the government has done the government has basic science technology innovation policy every five years the fifth plan was introduced last year and so if you can check if you took the basic plans there are many many more but what I'd like to focus on is on the national statistics special special zones but before I go into that I'll briefly go over the antitrust informants cases that's related to the introduction of new technologies the Blu-ray disc patent licensing practice came into question I should have written this as one blue if you go to the JFTC site you can search for cases and the rulings and there's a virgin in English also you need to search for one blue which is the actual name of the patent pool that implements the Blu-ray technology there were we suspected unreasonable restraint vertical restraint but the people who were restrained went out of business unfortunately before we could make a ruling they didn't go out of business they decided to get out of Blu-ray risk but our thoughts how we JFTC thought about the case can be quite illuminating exclusionary behaviour or agricultural co-ops I'm sure people are familiar with agricultural co-ops in Japan there's a national push to change their behaviour in terms of introducing new products innovation of markets for instance is hindered by how they expect exclusionary practices of the co-ops so in fact we just get ruled a cease and desist order last month over eggplants that the co-op is now has taken it to court has taken us to court over the cease and desist order so that you'll be hearing more about we're trying to improve the leniency programs which has been very effective for finding cartels and bid rigging and related to AI and big data we, JFTC just released a report study after a long a year long research by a committee that included economists, legal scholars and practitioners people in business over what competition policy can do about data and the effect the big data is having on the market and I'm sure you're aware it's been a big issue in Europe and in the United States also in Japan there has not been a case over big data and our belief is it's a very new frontier that we have to be very careful about but there are already many many tools in anti-monopoly law and rulings that we could use to go after the monopolization by people who own big data and the National Strategic Special Zones are this also I'm sure many of you know there are over 200 of them now and these are used for many many goals but one of them is when you want to introduce a new technology you can't wait for the laws to change particularly if it's things like medical devices or new experimental experimental test stations for digital for radio waves for instance you have to change a whole law in order to introduce a technology and you can't wait around for that so the government has made use of these National Strategic Special Zones so that they can actually use new technology without changing the law or having them go through the hoops of licensing or getting approval and these have I think been quite successful in the morning there was talk about the different forms of carbon reducing transportation that all new technology many of the new technology in that field come into this role law about area management so you have small cities like Toyota for instance that's a special zone and they try out new cars in those zones that would not have public highways so to answer one of the questions that Jenny posed at the very beginning of the session are Japanese or Japanese are willing to take risks so the Japanese way of taking risks I think is to have the government implement things like National Strategic Special Zones so the risk of new technology would be relatively small and my presentation here thank you very much so thanks very much Jenny and thanks Reiko for that wonderful intro to our session so I think before I get started one of my fears was being put into the innovation session was that it would be the eyes rolling and the buzzwords and all of that the thing we're sort of sick of in the government rhetoric around innovation so I felt like I almost need to have a glossary of terms and what they actually mean before we get started or at least in the context of my presentation so I think for my presentation it's quite important to differentiate between innovation and entrepreneurship I think they're sometimes used interchangeably of course they cross over and in way you could argue one enables the other for the context of where I'm coming from with this talk I'm very much more focused on the entrepreneurship side rather than I suppose the whole other challenge of STEM and the sort of innovation around inventions and patents and commercialization of love work and instead I'm going to focus a little bit more on what you could say that the soft skills are that I believe there's a gap in the sort of learning and development of our students and even professionals globally but specifically to Japan and Australia too and another part to give context to this talk is the actual work that I do to give you some context of where I'm coming from in a university sense so I work for something called the division of enterprise Be Me Up Scotty and other Star Trek jokes but it's really an initiative outside of anything to do with academic credit or research it's a nice clean analogy might be if you look at a careers and employment office that provides a service to students and graduates for employment opportunities this is something parallel but for people who want to make their own employment via entrepreneurship and starting up companies and businesses so my work is very much at the cold face of working with entrepreneurs and those who are trying to create some sort of career path or the beginnings of a career path taking an entrepreneur route I also want to talk about the concept of deep talent so if you follow a lot of the the financial review a few articles around innovation where Australia needs to go a lot of the focus is on deep technology and that's obviously important and we've obviously had both in Japan and Australia some tremendous success stories with obvious impact and I think that part's easier to understand but I think where our countries are at the weaker is really developing a pipeline of deep talent that are inclined to take a risk and take an entrepreneurial career path or at least attempt one and leverage the learnings along the way for whatever career they end up in so there are obviously many challenges for entrepreneurship anywhere a lot of the phrases I've put there have actually been explored in other talks today but I didn't want to go into too much depth or analysis of policies or restrictions around particular details with company structures from one country to another how changing something slightly might create an impact because I think anything in that area is incremental, slow and cannot be acted upon immediately but I think I would like to look more on the urgency of the situation in terms of the future of the global workforce and where the workforce is going and where our education system and the way start-up and small business owners need to go if they're going to be relevant even tomorrow so if we look at the S&P index which is a US based index the tracks where the top 500 companies are going in terms of how long they're actually lasting as organizations back in 1965 the average life span of an organization was about large businesses was 33 years if you fast forward to 1990 it already got down to 20 years and it's projected that in 2028 as soon as 2028 the average life span of a large business we're not even talking about start-ups is going to be 14 years so what does that say that says that if you are not prepared to work in an entrepreneurial company there aren't going to be many options for you regardless of industry regardless of sector regardless of the type of work you do your organization is going to become entrepreneurial now it doesn't mean that everyone has to be a start-up company founder it doesn't mean that you have to go and have a huge appetite for risk but what it does mean is that at some point in the near future you are going to be either starting an entrepreneurial company working for an entrepreneurial company or providing a service to an entrepreneurial company and I think with that as a backdrop it gives us a little bit of a kick in the pants in terms of how important this element of education and training is alongside the focus of STEM and arts and creativity and other things the soft skills around enterprise and how to do business how to do design thinking are as if not more important that's what I put to you today so in terms of Japan it actually is quite interesting how similar both in timing and theme the ABET and Turnbull initiatives at the government level were for supporting entrepreneurship as has been mentioned then I won't go too far into the policies themselves but there's basically initiatives to support entrepreneurship start up small businesses and there are relatively favorable conditions in policy there are grants there are funds if you take for example the next initiative they have something called the EDGE program now this is some of you may know I know there's someone from Kishu Daigaku here and they're a part of that program so that program is essentially came from a pool of government funding selection of universities I've given that to spend on entrepreneurship training and Kishu is one that is looking into medical innovation programs and we're actually in talks about a form of exchange program where instead of applying as a student looking for an exchange experience you are students you apply as a startup company and your application process is more to do with why does it make sense for your Fukuoka based startup idea to come and test the market in Australia and vice versa so we're looking at things like that some really interesting exciting things are happening but it is anecdotal still and in fact I don't think that's a huge concern because if you go back to the comment made by Sekinesan from the bank of Japan today it was basically the observation that not everyone is going to become an entrepreneur or should and I think that's always been the case and that's actually been the case in Silicon Valley so entrepreneurship and startups happen around the edges and I think it will always be that case but it's now a matter of working together with startups and know how around facilitating partnerships with startups as larger companies that we need to hurry up and get up to speed on so looking at corporate so there's sort of different ways the Japanese corporates are being involved in the innovation and startup ecosystem some of the obvious high high profile ones are the likes of Rakuten and Softbank and so whether they're being a sort of entrepreneurial and global sort of aggressive company like Rakuten whether they're actually starting up their own fund like a Softbank they're definitely key players globally now but again they're few and far between and hopefully they are inspirations to the next generation that this is a legitimate path and it doesn't have to be seen as something that it turns you into the black sheep of the family there are other models now that are being explored by corporates there's been a corporate venture model that's been around for a while now the likes of KDDI where they will invest strategically in startups that are aligned with their businesses as a way of diversifying their offerings but there's also a more recent model and this is where I think the real opportunity for some cross border in particular thinking about Australia and Japan and that is in a what I'll call a corporate accelerator program model so for those of you who have been in or around the startup ecosystem in Australia there's a group called slingshot and their basic model is they will partner with a corporate whether it be HCF or NRMA and they will set up a startup accelerator program that is backed by said corporate and they will provide some funding to startups that apply on a competitive basis to be accelerated through a one month program and the idea is that they are actually building companies to invest further in at the other end of the three months or to acquire for strategic M&A and there has been of late a recent example of this model popping up in Japan so there's a group called crew CRE WW they've basically been doing this similar kind of model with the likes of Panasonic with the likes of even government organizations the hankyu group and another one that comes to mind that's quite interesting is Tokyo Rail so you could imagine from the corporate side they're looking for ways to keep up with disruptives sorry I said not to say disruption with startups that are taking their market share and the way they're doing that is literally starting, managing, running a program investing in the teams as they develop and probably having a say in how those companies stay aligned with their core business as the investors and that seems to be an area of growth and something to possibly explore between Australia and Japan seeing as the model is showing some early signs of success in both countries looking at the startup ecosystem I spoke about the EDGE program with universities there's also well Japan has a much longer history of having venture capital and actually startup support programs than does Australia in fact there's close to 100 venture capital funds in Japan that have been investing in startups the key issue with the ecosystem at the startup level for Japan is most of the startups are domestic facing and the biggest challenge with that is it's not translating to bigger markets and it turns into the same old scenario where you're trying to wrap a layer of localization and translation and language services around a product that isn't really being built for a market other than Japan and to be fair Australia has a similar problem so that is causing a bit of an opportunity for foreign players to come in to the Japanese ecosystem some of the notable ones being a group called 500 startups so that's one of the big Silicon Valley venture capital firms and they have an accelerator program and they've set up actually interestingly in partnership with Kobe city government and basically they're looking to create startups with capability in both Japan and western markets and they're they're interestingly seem to have caused a bit of a ripple effect in the Kansai region soon after the 500 startup initiative was announced Osaka city government came out with what's known as the Osaka Innovation Hub and the Osaka Innovation Hub itself is a very large co-working space that tries to bring together local entrepreneurs in fact from all Kansai wide with the corporates that are interested in innovation but the interesting move they've made is most of their events are in English so you can actually walk in and it does have somewhat of a Singapore or Hong Kong co-working space feel in that you can hear many different accents but usually they're using English so that to me is a sign of hope so and I think it also plays to where the opportunities are for the Japanese startup ecosystem to further develop for me it's very much around developing the talent pool and I think it would be difficult to separate a global approach with an entrepreneurial approach in the context of the Japanese market demographics aren't very good if you're just going to be an inwardly facing company now so in the same way that Australian startups have this rhetoric they keep being told that you have to be global from day one I think that's very similar to the approach that some of the newer more internationally inclined incubators are taking so what does that actually mean so what does global from day one mean and does it even make sense for early stage companies and to answer that I'm going to segue into the program I run with my other hat so I started last year with two co-founders in Sydney both Japanese nationals who are residents of Sydney a program called innovation dojo and the basic premise is back to that core deep talent need in terms of starting a startup with a true and natural global capability so in this case we focused on the vertical of Japan and Australia we often get asked why Japan and why Australia why not the US and China if you're talking about entrepreneurship but really we weren't looking for what the biggest and the biggest markets were it was more about how do we tackle the problem of these great trading partners having a long standing relationship that we love talking about but in a way in a sense it could be interpreted as just being waiting to be cannibalized by other more aggressive and more cashed up countries that are looking at the same problems so what if we looked at areas like agriculture and ag tech and what if we looked at the aging population and solutions around health that both countries have real pain points around and instead of scouring the labs for solutions that may or may not be the right one why don't we create companies with all the elements that Silicon Valley tells us we need in a start-up so that the old hipster hacker hustler so you need someone with design skills you need someone with engineering or science behind product development and you need someone with business skills but let's add a fourth element and make that the sort of Asia literacy that was asked in a question earlier and so what we're doing with innovation is we are making a competitive application process for would-be entrepreneurs and you either have to fit one of those categories and we're actually designing teams so that they have all the elements that a potential successful start-up would have including bilingual capability so of the seven companies that were created through our first cohort all of them had a Japanese speaker at least one in their team and it was a very interesting experiment for us so you can actually see in that image there V Kaewa so that's a play on VR virtual reality and A Kaewa so they're using virtual reality to train language students and that's a very interesting team so that we actually found some Australian born Japanese who were interested in participating and we found a Chinese national who might graded but her Japanese was better than the guy with Japanese parents because she was a Japanese language major and another developer joined their team and they in the period of a month not only created a virtual reality platform for learning languages but they actually taught themselves how to code VR they had not done that before so the depth of talent is quite amazing and that is sort of our poster child company at the moment because they're actually making money from what they're doing we took them over to Japan in April and little did they know they would be pitching in Japanese in front of large groups of salary men and it was you know obviously a character and skill building experience for the team but what was quite exciting for us was the reaction from the Japanese side where they were seeing something that they would never have predicted and that is Australian first time entrepreneurs pitching in Japan in Japanese and to them that was very exciting and I think that's a potential model to invest more in there have been some recent movement from the Australian tech scene into Japan and vice versa I've only got about two minutes left so I'll just talk about money tree so money tree is a very interesting case study and it sort of talks to what I'm trying to do with innovation dojo so a young Australian named Paul Chapman and a mate of his who were majors I believe at University of Sydney in their Japanese language program they took off to Japan and had an idea to start a business around financial technology so they created a mobile application that helps educate people on making investment decisions and little did they know at the time that they would end up being invested in by two of the major banks in Japan and raising up to Series B now in investments and the coolest part for me of their story is only now are they trying to enter the Australian market so they're actually using Ostrade for advice on entering the Australian market as Australian entrepreneurs who have had their first success in Japan so I think maybe that part is a strange series of events but the core of that case goes back to the deep talent so let's try and work together and create a pipeline of entrepreneurial bright people in both countries and let's tackle the big problems that we have because there are a lot of problems we can work together on and perhaps that model can then flow through to the way we approach politics and potential wars and things like that so I'll leave it at that, thanks very much Good afternoon and welcome and thank you very much for this opportunity to present and Josh what a great presentation and I think there are a few ideas I have where we might be able to work together so good so Jenny talked about well I think it was political posturing with no substance when we talk about innovation so perhaps that's why I'm here but actually Questacon we're engaged in science and society science communication because as we move forward it's really important that science serves society and for all the great research and innovation to happen you have to bring the public along on the journey with you because that's the big challenge we're moving to an area where the world is filled with anti-science pseudo-science and we need a smart population that can discriminate between science and non-science and nonsense we need to think about human capacity starting with the very young and in Questacon we start with the very young the young children who are in Questacon this morning have every chance of welcoming in the 22nd century so just think about that what world are they going to be growing up in as they go through school university work into the future that's going to be such a profound change for them so human capacity development preparing for the future these planetary scale challenges we have to generate a solutions generation so that's our core business at Questacon and I want to very quickly reflect on the history of Questacon and then use that as a jumping off point to look at perhaps some new directions that we can move into so the Australian government in 1984 reached out to the Japanese government asked for help in building a science centre here in Canberra and the Japanese government decided that they would get involved set up a committee the Australian National 200 Years Commemoration Forum with representatives from business, academics and government under the chairmanship of Ashiro Saito who was the chairman of Nippon Steel Corporation and to become the president of Cadendron and in 1986 that forum reported to Foreign Minister Shintara Abbey father of the current prime minister and they decided because of the close friendly relationship between Japan and Australia the strengthening of that relationship is very important and that the forum recommended that the Japanese government and citizens fund half the cost of building the National Science Centre Questacon Questacon is a hands on science centre here in Canberra, across Australia internationally it's been doing it since 1988 when it opened it works with teachers it's involved in science communication training it helps build capacity in science centres around Asia and into Africa it generates about $60 million a year for the ACT tourism economy and everything that Questacon does and has done it's important gift from Japan and the Japanese business community that helped encourage the Australian government to get over the line and build the centre so thank you very much for that on behalf of all the Australian people and the people in Africa and Asia who have benefited from some of our work so the relationship between Questacon and Japan and Japanese institutions is very strong, broad and deep and we've had many examples of how that can be reflected over the years we regularly celebrate our successes together and our friendships and we have a lot of partnership activities, particularly in the area of science communication training so we work very closely with the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno or particularly with Maraikan where we have these strong relationships the organisations JAXA, JAMSTEC we've exhibited their work in Canberra and we've done a number of other things and we keep on celebrating that relationship in many ways so Mrs Abe came to visit us as part of our 25th anniversary celebrations we had the Kaidendron we hosted a dinner at Questacon for them and we have this ongoing friendship with Maraikan and we were able to help celebrate their 10th anniversary not in 2011 and we've helped deliver a whole series of visitors to Maraikan and other institutions including our Prime Minister and Professor Brian Schmidt will be going there in October and we managed to organise a visit for him on October 13th so there we go Our Science Circus is our mobile pop-up science centre, we can tour around Australia and set up 50 hands-on exhibits in about two hours Students from the Australian National University run that around Australia, they do science shows in schools they do a public exhibition which they operate and that model which has been operating for 30 years in Australia we were able to take it to Japan as part of our 25th anniversary celebration but we went through with the help of the Australia Japan Foundation so thank you very much for that support we go to the tsunami recovery areas of northeast Honshu and particularly Minimi Sanriku where Australia has a strong presence and we work very closely with the science communicators in five different organisations in five different cities and it was fantastic learning together we learnt so much and I hope Japanese colleagues likewise did and I know Mext were very grateful and Miraikan were given a special award because of this programme and I'm really delighted to be able to report that perhaps not been announced yet perhaps I shouldn't say that but with the help of the Australia Japan Foundation we'll be going back to the Osaka region in 2018 as part of the celebrations of the focus year of the public diplomacy between Australia and Japan and we're hoping to build the programme and introduce some more entrepreneurial enterprise activities and hearing about your group in Osaka really just gets my juices going and I think there's some tremendous opportunities there where we can work together Questacon and Miraikan are part of a world community of science centres it's a fantastic community we work in all sorts of different countries and across all sorts of borders whether they're geographic, racial, religious, political, economic and we're all gathering together in Tokyo in November this year I've had the pleasure of serving on the International Planning Committee for that conference and it has the focus of connecting the world for a sustainable future and we've not talked a lot about sustainability today we've talked a lot about innovation enterprise, business, research but Japan is also a leader in sustainability and it should be acknowledged that this is a strong focus and the science technology and society forum each year has always had that strong focus on what they call the light and dark of science but we need to work together to find those planetary solutions so when science centres get together we can, collectively we reach about 350 million young people each year, we can do an awful lot together one of the things I'll be speaking about when I'm in Tokyo is an Australian product developed in partnership with the Crawford school here at the ANU a young person's plan for the planet one of the challenges young people have is that people don't listen to them and yet the future is their future so talking to students in schools they've been told what their future is by old blokes like me, they want to design and develop their own future so reaching into the schools empowering them, connecting them teaching them how to develop a business plan in the context of the sustainable development goals has been a really powerful experience we've run a 20 school pilot in Australia this year I'm pleased that we'll be starting our international pilots for international schools in Japan in Australia each school this year will partner with two new schools so go from 20 to 60 to, well I'll keep 180 internationally each country can bring their own young Japanese or young Mauritians or young Fijians plan for the planet together and I reckon in five years we'll have empowered young people right across the planet to write the first business plan to manage the planetary life support systems on Earth because there isn't one at the moment and our political leaders and our business leaders don't seem capable of writing it so let's get the youngsters to write it so there we go so science centres we work in an informal learning domain of side schools but outside schools, we go inside schools as well we help teachers but our space is in that science and society space with science and it's really important because youngsters school is important to develop foundation knowledge but actually most of what kids learn is outside school peer to peer tutoring is the way most kids learn IT these days and that happens in bedrooms and dining room tables around the world I suspect so Questacon runs a national science engagement program inspiring Australia I know there's been interest in Japan I've talked to a number of officials about the Australian model and this is perhaps something we can share a bit future we run a smart skills program and that's again something that I'm really interested to see emerging through some of the initiatives in Japan but you've got to start early you can actually start enterprise education in primary schools and build sequentially in the way that we identify young sporting talent very early and nurture it to win Olympic medals in 2020 whoever it is we should do the same with entrepreneurs there are young kids who we've got an 11 year old company director here in Canberra 11 year old you'd be amazed what young kids can do if they're given a chance we need to give them that chance so the future STEM is where we're going into the future this is the the new directions where we need to be youngsters now need to be flexible they need to develop not only the foundation knowledge they need to develop smart skills and they need to develop enterprise skills because that's the future of work that's the future for most of our young people in Australia and I expect in Japan too they need creativity and imagination they need to be able to work together they need to network they can find knowledge they know how to do that but they have to develop the wisdom the enterprise skills are the really important things and I was just going to wave this report I don't know how many of you know the foundation for young Australians but you should and they do some really good work on behalf of young Australians there's a series of reports and this one came out last month the new basics and there's about four reports talking about the future and the future of the world of work and helping young people think into that future and I commend their work to you and they're certainly behind this idea of developing the enterprise skills alongside the technical skills and they've got a lot of evidence in the reports about to do that now the bottom down here I've put a single strike out through the ability to pass exams I decided it wasn't worth a double strike out because it's actually still very important but it's not the only thing that you have to do and we know that Japan succeeds wonderfully well in PISA number four but when you look at there's a study I think in 2012 so it's a bit historic but out of 24 developed countries Japan was the 24th in terms of enterprise and entrepreneurial skills so that tells us that we need to do a bit more and it's great that the Japanese Government recognised that changed the national curriculum took out 30% of the content to allow students to focus on problem solving and some of those opportunities to use their knowledge in real world context so really important and these things are moving forwards in both countries so I'm going to stop at that point and leave a little bit of time for questions so thank you very much and thank you Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and Jenny thank you for giving me the privilege of attending today it's been a real eye-opener although I've worked in universities for a long time and of course given many talks this will be one of the least academic talks I've ever given because I'm not going to talk to you about the results of a survey of 100 academics in Australia and 100 academics in Japan and how they got on collaborating at Jenny's invitation I'm going to talk about my personal experiences so that's not terribly academic it's a small sample I did calibrate my thoughts with two colleagues and they suggested very very few changes I should say so to say a little bit about the background because this will explain better where I'm coming from most of my jobs have been as an engineering academic but I have had experience with companies and governments and professional societies I had a year and a half part-time with a company in Silicon Valley I've been a company director in Australia for medical product companies and actually AnuTech here at the ANU I was on the science council for three prime ministers in Australia I've led a couple of professional societies I've been on technical advisory boards for companies not just in Australia so in comparison with say professor of mathematics I've had a richer set of life experiences also I'm in an area where it's very very typical to do collaborative work and I have to go back a few years to find a paper that I wrote by myself it might even be ten years I don't know so it's certainly more than 95% of what I write is collaborative and probably 50% of what I write has an author from outside of Australia I've had an aggregate of years in each of the United States, China, Japan and French and German speaking parts of continental Europe a small amount of time in Korea and South America and Singapore Hong Kong so this is where I'm coming from and my Japanese experiences do include multiple collaborative visits to Kyoto University and Tokyo Institute of Technology by collaborative visit I mean it's at least some weeks duration and I expect to produce a paper out of the visit in distinction to a one day visit where you give a talk I did write one textbook with a Nagoya university professor and there's the title of it and it's also available in English and I've done two papers with Japanese co-authors this year and I'll show you one of them in a moment my experiences with Japanese companies though are more limited I went to Fujitsu a couple of times probably mid 1980s I think and advanced a couple of research proposals and it was unsuccessful but it stimulated me to try to learn Japanese which I've just done on a self study basis and of course this is like climbing Mount Everest and I'm in about the bottom base camp but at least I can read a bit of signage in the stations and so on another company that I've had a little bit to do with is one started by a former student of mine an Australian who went to Japan in the mid 1980s on a Mombu shop a post-doctoral fellowship and married a Japanese girl came back to Australia for several years but then they went and settled in Japan and he is genuinely a bi-cultural sort of person he has twins one's called Megumi and the other's called James so there you see the two cultures and he is a patent broker where he approaches Japanese companies that have patents and he markets their intellectual property in the United States and also Japan because he's taught him and also China because he's taught himself Chinese but really my experiences with Japanese companies have been quite small so here's one of the papers that I wrote with some Japanese people quite recently now I'm not going to give you a lecture on this stuff but Professor Corbett suggested I say a little bit about it Australia wants to defend its borders it uses unmanned airborne vehicles as part of that some of these vehicles are 2 metre wingspan vehicles and they can fly for 24 hours in order to triangulate transmissions from people smugglers or illegal fishermen they generally fly in formation so the task is to keep three vehicles say or even six in an equilateral triangle if it's three vehicles with a side length of several kilometres the vehicles are very primitive so one's going at 80 knots another's going at 79 and the wind's blowing them round so how do you keep three vehicles in a triangular formation and there's slightly different speeds and they're being blown round by the wind and you don't want an army of people working very hard on the ground that's the engineering sort of challenge that this paper deals with so now I want to give you my personal observations on collaboration I think there are cultural background issues that affect the technical discussions differently and this is the way I characterise them if you're an Australian and you've never been to Japan before and you go on your first visit you'll think the Japanese are very hesitant to express a differing opinion they might say well it's difficult to say but they'll never say they disagree with you on the other hand I'm sure that from the Japanese side Australians must seem very confronting at times when they take a different view to that expressed by the Japanese so there's a bit of a cultural difficulty there I've also seen and my students really point this out I've had several go to Japan and the Japanese people talking to their professor in Japan or perhaps talking to me are much more reserved than the Australian student talking to the Australian professor and really progress in science and engineering does require a lot of dialogue and tossing round of ideas and it is unfortunate if people feel restrained in putting a point of view and talking about politics or religion or women or anything really difficult like that it's just technical stuff which is kind of neutral and yet there's still some difficulty in bringing different opinions together I suspect too but it's only a suspicion that collaborating is easier for engineers and social scientists because engineering rests on a largely platform of largely mathematics and physics mathematics is effectively black and white in what it says there is a theorem or there's not a theorem and so it's easier to be able to point to an authority that establishes that a certain point of view is right or wrong than I imagine to be the case in social sciences another observation I have is that to me there's more hesitancy in Japan than Australia to pursue new technical directions when I think of the technical new technical directions and big advances and how they were kicked off in my particular discipline the United States is number one I believe even if you count for their size if you calculated on the basis of new technical directions per hundred million of population I think the US would easily beat Japan maybe the Japanese are fast followers but there's a sort of conservatism that is maybe driving the selection of technical problems in Japan at the university level I think it's probably true that Japanese travel less outside of Japan to collaborate if I'm in the US there's very often European visitors there there's very often Chinese visitors there's not very often Japanese visitors of course many of them do travel but in terms of the degree of travel I think it's much less and it's very much less than for Japanese students in coming to the formulation of a paper what's often going on is that someone says something and then someone says well it's not quite like that it's like this there's a thesis and there's an antithesis and then together you form a synthesis so I guess what I'm saying with a number of these remarks is that to me that process is trickier for an Australian in Japan because probably of the culture that's engendered since childhood the culture that gives great respect to senior people and sets a great store by harmony in discussions so a second set of observations I've been talking about culture another issue is language and it's certainly the case that you can compare people or I can compare people in engineering schools in China, Korea and Japan and I've got a view about the students in the best schools so in China it might be Tsinghua University I'm not talking about a lower grade university and in Korea, Seoul National University or these two, Kaist and Jist which are entirely English speaking in their complete programs and in Japan like Kyoto University or Tudai something like that so for me the Chinese are better than the Koreans and the Koreans are better than the Japanese I think in Japan it's probably more diverse all the universities whereas in China there's a huge variation between the best universities and the weaker ones but if we're just looking at the best this is the ordering I'd give on it and that English level or the comparative lack of facility in English can I think reinforce the reticence of Japanese in the technical discussion that precedes the writing of the paper I think these days senior people in Japanese are normally fine in English, they've had lots of international experiences at least at conferences although it certainly wasn't the case 30 years ago and the mid-career people have a middle standard now what it is in social science I don't know, I'm sure there are disciplinary differences I do think that the staff and students are technically very well prepared you can mention an idea and they know all about it and that's a very nice situation when you're interacting with them now here's another issue engineering is considered a discipline in Australia where unfortunately there are only about 15% of the student body who are females it's unfortunate because there's a great waste of talent I don't know what the fraction is in Japan but it must be somewhere close to zero and I have never I can never recall meeting one female Japanese engineering professor so that's an even bigger talent waste to you than we have in Australia it was very nice to see that one of our Japanese speakers today was a female professor but that's for me an exception so if I wanted to sum up now and this is my final slide collaboration is slower for the cultural reasons and the language reasons and that's my principal message but my supplementary message and I suppose you think of these things near the end of your career it's been a privilege for me to have visited Japan so many times and made some wonderful friends there it's been an enriching cultural experience that I'd have paid vast sums to have but I didn't have to so I'm even luckier on that account so with that I'd like to thank Professor Cool but again because I could get in this final statement of thanks up to the front table here we have about 20 minutes so while I was going to start by myself posing some questions to the speakers I'm actually going to open up to questions from the floor right from the beginning I will hold my own questions until if we have a lull in the questions I will leap in but I'm going to open up first of all and we have the roving mic so can we have some questions from the floor who would like to start microphone is on we've lulled into we have haven't we it is late in the afternoon well while everybody is thinking of their questions then I will begin with a couple of general questions that I wanted to pose one is something that Josh mentioned when he opened up about terminology and definitions and so my question is do you think we need to define innovation and if we are going to do it would we do it differently do you think in Japan from the way we might do in Australia or does this not matter is it a mistake to try and pin this down that we sort of understand and we should just leave it fixable and open so if I can have the first go of that I think we have failed to define it in the use in Australia so goodness knows how it would translate so I think it is a term that is overused there was actually a time when I wear a hat as a divisional head in the innovation and science I should declare that there was a time when we weren't allowed to use innovation there was a change from one political party to another and innovation seemed to be associated with one particular government and party so we had to stop using it literally in the department and for those of you who know the television series utopia it was a very utopian moment so anyway we have now reintroduced innovation back into our lexicon but it is still formally fine Great but what word would you use in Japanese and do you think it's helpful or not I'm glad you brought that up because there's no well maybe my Japanese colleagues in the audience could say otherwise there's really no word that means innovation in Japanese and for that reason when they changed the name of the science for science and technology policy they had to use the word innovation not that Japanese they say innovation not a Japanese equivalent because there was no equivalent term and there's really no and it's also noted that there's no agreement on what innovation means one comment I would make as a social scientist is that in Japan when you say innovation it definitely means something to do with natural sciences and engineering although I think in English for instance you would say that a child used a toy in a very innovative way meaning you did something different from the traditional way and innovation in Japan doesn't always cover that kind of meaning of innovation so now many people stress that innovation can use the word innovation to mean social innovation as well but it doesn't always have to be something about machines or chemical equations that's very interesting because I looked up some definitions I looked at the Oxford English Dictionary but I also looked at a recent report in Australia called the performance review of Australian innovation and science and the science research system coming out from the new body that was established under the innovation agenda and the wording that is used there is all about social systems and about economic processes and it's nothing at all to do with scientific discovery or invention so perhaps we have really a very different cultural kind of thought process that goes on when you use that word now come on, questions from the floor you can't all be asleep good, there we go right, so we'll start with you to play then Carol so I would like to ask the questions to Professor Anderson I cannot agree to your contents in the presentation more actually many Japanese universities are now acknowledging that more international collaboration is necessary I myself have a lot of international collaboration in my research but at the same university tries to take some top down policy to facilitate the international cooperation but according to my experiences I think international cooperation is maybe from the bottom up somehow I have a connection with the researcher or maybe writing the paper with the classmates so that I would like to know whether maybe the useful top down policy from the university to facilitate the international research correlation yes I think there is I believe that you can't collaborate with someone unless you see them face to face at some point it's very very hard to do it otherwise with email or email Skype so you need to create opportunities to bring people face to face now the graduate students in the ANU can get a Vice Chancellor's grant that's probably got some fancy name and maybe Jenny invented it I don't know but they can get a Vice Chancellor's grant to go to a conference and the supervisor may say who are you going to target here's how you should talk to this person and that can be that's the basis for the students I think there's funds for probably post-docs and the Academy of Science and the Academy of Tech Sciences and Engineering have travel funds and some are reserved for young people to go to various countries so the question about the university though is where's the money going to come from and then some come from the centre and some I guess should come from the college and I think that's fine probably at the ANU it's not fine other universities in Australia and I don't know about Japan Carol Lawson from the ANU College of Law just a comment for Professor Anderson I very much enjoyed your presentation and I hate to have to tell you that a couple of years ago when I would walk through the engineering faculty at Nagoya University on my way to work in the College of Law I would see 100 boys and one girl alone with no one speaking to her so I'm not sure that there's a pipeline of bright young women coming up through the Japanese engineering faculties but like you I wish there were I actually have a question for Professor Aoki recently I read an article in the American Chamber of Commerce Journal in Japan almost publications saying that the reason why we don't see women in leadership in Japan is that hiring practices focus on age, gender and experience so young, male and experienced in the field she suggests that Japan can cope with the shrinking talent pool by changing that hiring practice to focus on passionate capacity and so look at people who are not male, not young experienced and succeed what would be your thoughts and comments on that proposition? Unfortunately I've never been in a hiring position at a commercial organization I only know hiring in academic institutions and it is true that you don't and I've also had experience hiring in universities in the United States in New Zealand and the way you evaluate people are very very different between New Zealand universities and US and New Zealand universities in Japan you look at the CV and basically see how many exactly like the Chamber of Commerce articles said you look at where the professor got his degree and now maybe you stress a lot more on how much the person has published but no weight is given to the reference letter well in the US in New Zealand reference letters are very very important because people realize people are very multidimensional their talents are multidimensional and you always stress what you think is good about this person right and you also implicitly say things that the shortcomings of that person it's not rude but you get the idea and I think at least in economics and I've had chance to read some recommendation letters and science and engineering when I was engaged in public policy the idea is the same everybody knows how important these reference letters are abroad and you know how to convey what's important in your field and this practice unfortunately most Japanese universities don't exist yet and so in short answer to your question about chamber of commerce I think it's true the way you value people is very very rigid and they know people are afraid partly I think to step out of the traditional way and hire, try somebody new and by the way about the percentage of female students I think national average in engineering schools the percentage of female students will be 5 or 7 percent and the percentage goes becomes lower as you go up the ladder to assistant professors associated and very few for professors in engineering that's what's observed I might just follow on if I can so I think that the problem with the diversity and equity particularly around gender but also racial and ethnicity follows through to the start-up ecosystem a lot of the start-up events and the SME sort of gatherings are dominated by men in suits still or men in t-shirts if it's start-ups and there are some interesting initiatives popping up to try and tackle those problems so one that I'm quite close to at the University of New South Wales is called the New Wave and that's about a platform specifically encouraging female students to try entrepreneurship first in a company creation program where females are leading the companies but the more important part I think is a almost cradling support that we wrap around existing programs open to everyone whereas we've set up virtual board of advisors with experienced female leaders giving the next batch of females going through the normal programs a kind of competitive edge and that's had some pretty positive results so far so maybe a model like that could be replicated in the classrooms perhaps very interesting there was one other hand here yes okay thank you thank you so much for your fantastic discussion I actually have two questions first one regarding business processes so a lot has been said about language barriers but a number of companies have been really successful in terms of business processes innovations particularly Uniqlo and Rakuten they completely introduced English as language that is meant to be used all everywhere in their offices and it has proven to be very successful so my question in regards to that is do you think other companies should follow this innovation and what are other business specific business processes should be maybe changed in order to foster lower level innovation and entrepreneurship and second question should I ask now okay thank you it hasn't been discussed yet but I think everyone is thinking about it is the influence of innovation on labor market particularly in regards to the question that has been discussed earlier in terms of labor productivity so a general idea is that innovation will challenge labor market and will cause a lot of employment and however not so much like a pessimistic view is that innovation can not so much replace labor so the question is do you think it is it can actually happen that innovation well curated innovation will complement labor and increase labor productivity rather than replace it and if Japan is actually concerned with the problem of labor replacement due to innovation thank you great questions and they could keep us going for quite a long time we actually only have one minute before I'm going to call on Chiro so I'm going to ask for a very quick response and then you might want to follow up afterwards Reiko is that some of it perhaps your area actually I'm doing coffee breaks people are talking about this labor innovation issue so I'm going to talk about the English Rakuten and Unicos were very successful I think probably they've been successful because they've been able to skin the people who can do English and maybe there's some correlation with other skills in being able to speak English like they've had they've studied abroad or something so English attracts some other kind of talent as well although in the long run your language skills really shouldn't be correlated with your other skills I don't think because everybody requires language right so in the short run in the short run in the short run you only would benefit if you're like your Unico or Rakuten and you're the minority doing this in the long run I think Japan has to do it I think the government is now speaking to teach English at an earlier age because the ordering of these Chinese and Korean students and Japanese students capability of English has been noted in the long run I think would happen naturally that more workers speak Japanese workers speak English and also there would be more non-Japanese non-speakers Japanese speaking workers What about the other part of the question was what other kinds of business innovations might give companies an edge Do you have a sense from looking at competitive companies with more of lens Are there other innovations that make a difference If I can do that I'll be doing it Maybe The other panelists should have a better answer actually I don't know if this is classified as an innovation but I think something as simple as looking at the status quo in relation to in relation to young CEO salaries in Japan that's sort of a big barrier to overcome if you really go into trying to encourage young high potential I guess entrepreneurs to stay in Japan working in startups there's definitely not a natural pathway to getting a big attractive salary or VP of whatever section of the companies as there is in Silicon Valley and to some extent in Australia so I think doing some work around that whether it's actually a policy or simply like an equivalent of a rack with 10 taking the lead on those kind of things when they're spinning out companies that would be one area I think you could see as a low hanging fruit thank you there are a whole lot of questions I think that are still in the air and a lot of material in the presentations we've had that I would love to unpack but unfortunately we don't have time and I think at that point it just remains to thank the speakers very much and then call on Shiro to wrap up for us maybe after that thank you very much Jenny we're out of time but let me take this opportunity to make a couple of remarks and then some final thank yous before we wrap up the 2017 Japan update just looking back to last year's Japan update our theme was reinventing Japan really Japan from a position of domestic strength and stability and strength in leadership all Japan really had to worry about was the third arrow structural reforms and managing a rising China that has completely changed now what a difference a year makes so this year has been a whole lot of uncertainty and turbulence introduced into the scene the big shock of the election of Donald Trump and Japan managing that and all the uncertainty around the alliance as well as the escalation of the North Korean nuclear threat so domestically Prime Minister Abe has been shaken by some scandals and his LDP was decimated in the Tokyo elections in July so we've tried to cover a few of these issues this year reflect on seeking new directions for Japan and as our East Asia forum quarterly says looking at ways for Japan to reposition and to challenge tackle some of these really big challenges so Prime Minister Abe no longer looks invincible and his leadership to 2020 is far from guaranteed so perhaps this is time that we might see some more action on economic reform to build political capital some change might come naturally almost automatically we've heard from Sekine-san the high pressure economy might deliver rising prices rising wages might happen endogenously eventually from labor shortages but we've seen labor market institutions persist in Japan and I think there is a role for significant reform by government Japan still faces these big structural challenges around demographics shrinking and aging of the population and how Japan tackles this big challenge and all the associated challenges will make a big difference for living standards in Japan we know that the productivity growth is going to have to do the heavy lifting and I'm glad we had a session on innovation at the end today but as the Foreign Minister and Aizawa-san talked about Japan has been a model for the rest of Asia in the post-war period and if Japan manages to tackle these big challenges Japan will be again a model for Northeast Asia and beyond so look finally just on behalf of the Australia Japan Research Centre and the A-New Japan Institute I want to thank the audience you guys staying the whole day a long day it's fruitful but I realise a lot of you are very busy I want to thank very much the speakers who've travelled from very far from Japan and elsewhere but also the local speakers who have made time out of their busy schedules I'd like to thank our sponsors the Japan Foundation and the Australia Japan Foundation without whose support this wouldn't happen I'm really grateful for the ongoing support and last but not least Ebony Young and Jill Mulbray-Tsumi who really put the whole thing together and really grateful for professional help and the whole team was really as usual did a wonderful job they're far too over-qualified as sub-editors for East Asia Forum running mics but they did a fantastic job so really grateful to them and really grateful to everybody else we will send a survey around again we look forward to your feedback to everybody who registered we'll have a survey going to you we look forward to seeing you next year again from maybe a completely different Japan once again and finally thank you very much