The RIETI inventor survey, which was conducted in 2007, invited inventors to contribute their views and opinions on the constraints on the R&D performance of their organizations, and the policies and managerial agenda for improving it. A total of 1,300 inventors (around one quarter of those who...

This report presents an overview of the results of an inventor survey, focusing on Japanese inventions for which priority claims were filed during the period 2003 to 2005 with both the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). This survey, conducted as a part of an...

Effective research and development (R&D) at companies and universities and the efficient commercialization of their results are considered vital to the future growth of the Japanese economy. However, social scientific knowledge on the objectives and motives of R&D, knowledge sources for...

This paper analyzes what types of R&D projects and R&D firms generate important spillover effects, and which are subject to funding constraints. It also analyzes what types of projects and firms are targeted for public support and whether the selection of targets is consistent with spillovers....

Given the expected fundamental reform of Article 35 of the Japanese patent law, which has been governing the transfer of ownership of employee inventions to firms, the freedom of designing the incentive system for inventors would increase significantly. In order to provide basic guiding...

We conducted an inventor survey to examine the contribution of science to corporate inventions. The survey results show that for about one-quarter of the inventions, scientific knowledge embodied in literature, equipment, or research materials in the last 15 years was essential to conceive or...

Globalization of business leads to environmental uncertainty for corporate organizations. To establish competitive advantage, organizations need continuous introduction of new products and services to markets and quick implementation of new strategies. This paper shows what kinds of initiatives...

A decomposition of the gender gap in earned income among white-collar regular employees in Japan was conducted using the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux method based on propensity-score weighting. The results show that gender differences in three human-capital variables, namely, education, age, and the...

This paper has constructed a theoretical model to explain why the share of those who remain unmarried has increased in Japan. It is still common for women to leave the labor market due to marriage and thereby see an irreversible decrease in their income. Taking into consideration of the...

Employing massive contract- and firm-level data provided by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Unit of the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC), one of the largest government lending institutions for SMEs, and linking the data with other firm-level data from a business credit information company,...