Brain drain or brain circulation?: what international cooperative strategies can foster the cultivation of science-based human resources and promulgate their contributions to global innovation system?

One of the dilemmas that policy makers in most of the developed countries have recently faced is the fact that national innovation initiatives that each country is pursuing in its own interest interfere with each other. This comes into sight particularly in the field of human resources. As science-based industry has become a key drive of the national economy, it is urgently needed to foster highly educated researchers and scientists not only for the developed countries but also for the emerging ones like China and India. However research universities, the most suitable organizations to create science-based human resources are concentrated in a small number of the countries like the United States and Europe. Naturally, talented persons want to study in better research institutions and human resources are easily crossing the national borders. As a result, it is difficult to use academic education programs in the highly developed countries exclusively for their own national interest even though they are financially supported by their governments. National policies of higher education have been increasingly shifted their focus to the encouragement of international collaboration. It may be no exaggeration to say that science-based human resources now belong to the international public domain. In addition, it is now important to cultivate science-based human resources capable of taking the initiative in the development of independent efforts and international collaborations to solve pressing global problems. What international cooperative strategies can foster the cultivation of science-based human resources and promulgate their contributions to global innovation system? What is the most useful model to coordinate different actors of each country-government, university, and industry-with intent of developing a global innovation system? The aims of this article are to survey a theoretical framework on collaborative aspects of knowledge creation, and to contextualize what many scholars have discussed with respect to the broader background of related studies on university graduate education, the cultivation of scientific human capital, and knowledge transfer through the mobility of human resources. Finally we will conclude by suggesting that international collaborations are important not only for developing resources in Japan but also for gaining an overall understanding of the global innovation system.