Japanese government project on innovation database platform — As an infrastructure for improving quality of science, technology and innovation policy

The Japanese government has been implementing a research program aimed at rationalizing the process of science and technology innovation policy-making. Part of this is a project to build an innovation database platform, which has been underway since 2011. The primary goal of this project is making available systematic data for promoting empirical quantitative research on science, technology and innovation policy. This paper describes the goal of this project and what the resultant data infrastructure could bring. Insights gained through past activities are reported as well. What is valued in the public and higher education sectors is creating databases for bibliometrics, a powerful methodology for the quantitative analysis of output from scientific research. The project aims to eliminate the division between each levels of data (macro, mezzo and micro) arising from differences in the ways to create data, and to establish linkage between them, which we call a "vertical linkage" for its ability to connect upper and lower levels of data. The project also emphasizes "horizontal linkage," or links between bibliometric and non-bibliometric data such as data on R&D and research funding. In the business sector, which is the other key area, the project focuses on establishing mutual connections among different data sets, primarily including patent and corporate data, as well as data on innovation activities, intellectual property right (IPR) activities, and investments in R&D and intangible assets. The biggest hurdle to overcome in forming such mutual links between various data held by different companies lies in the organizing of patent data, a task that would call for a process known as "data cleansing," as in the case of bibliometric data. Almost three years have passed since the start of these efforts to develop da