Abstract

There is an increased appreciation of the potential benefits of more design thinking in policy making. Design thinking means amongst others, a more thorough exploration of needs and a better understanding of context. Such a design-focused approach could also benefit efforts to foster academia-industry collaboration in Japan. In order to learn from what works in other countries it is necessary to be able to describe the existing situation both abroad and at home. In addition we need a way to characterize countries along a meaningful set of dimensions to identify transferable elements for domestic programs. We present a framework for such a cross-national comparison. It consists of two classification schemes, one for academia-industry collaboration mechanisms and one for government initiatives which seek to foster these collaborations, as well as a set of dimensions for structural comparison of Japan and Western European countries. We carried out some proof of concept work for Japan and the United Kingdom and used the dimension set to identify candidates for future comparisons.