Bill Gates and Japanese Universities | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2005.07.04
On the morning of June 28, Bill Gates came to Japan for a press release on the " Microsoft Academic Cooperation Program ."
According to the announcement, this academic cooperation program aims to contribute to the development of Japan's academic world. Through it, Microsoft Co., Ltd. will promote joint research on themes related to advanced technologies and Japanese market needs, provide research grants, and foster researchers through mutual exchange with Japanese universities and research institutions. One of the programs, similar to what other multinational corporations like Sun and Cisco are already doing, is to select themes and provide research support to individual researchers and laboratories at Japanese universities. The initiative also aims to deepen collaboration with Japanese universities through academic exchanges, internships, and fellowships.
Now, while the general public is well aware that Microsoft develops and sells software like Windows XP and Microsoft Office, I wonder if many know just how much effort the company puts into the research and development of IT. The research itself is handled by MSR (Microsoft Research), and its headquarters are located on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. As my former colleague from my CMU days, Rick Rashid, is the Director of the research lab, I had the opportunity to visit with some students a few years ago, and it was a lush, green space befitting the name "campus." Currently, more than 700 researchers are engaged in R&D, and they have research bases in Cambridge, UK; San Francisco; Mountain View; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. The Beijing base is called MSRA (Microsoft Research Asia), where staff specialize in speech recognition and information processing technologies for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
In fact, the relationship between US IT companies and universities has changed significantly in recent years. Intel Research has established Research Centers and Institutes on or adjacent to the campuses of universities like the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Cambridge in the UK, hiring professors from those universities as directors and researchers. This method of launching Research Centers and Institutes is very efficient from the company's perspective. The time required for technology transfer also seems to be significantly reduced. From the university's perspective, on the other hand, it is critical to clearly define the line between the results of research conducted in university labs and projects and the research results from the company's Research Centers and Institutes.
On the other hand, while both Japanese IT companies and universities mutually recognize the importance of industry-academia collaboration and have been deepening their partnerships, is the Intel-style approach being avoided because it doesn't fit with Japanese culture? Indeed, it must be quite difficult to work for Intel when you enter one building on campus, and then return to your own lab's work when you go back to another building. My friend Andy Hopper, a professor at the University of Cambridge, also served as the Director of the former Olivetti Lab, and the issue of intellectual property ownership was a point of great concern for him.
Is a rather loose form of collaboration, such as comprehensive research agreements between Japanese universities and companies, better? Or is a more direct collaboration on university campuses, like the Intel model, preferable? We can only wait and see how things progress. However, it is clear that if the research environment at universities is not attractive, talented people will move to the corporate sector.
At SFC, an incubation facility is scheduled to be completed on campus by the end of the fiscal year, and we hope it will become a place for practicing new forms of collaboration.
(Date Published: 2005/07/04)