Japan’s IP Strategic Program 2020 Report Promotes Push for “With/After Corona” Social Change Through IP

The Japanese Prime Minister’s Cabinet Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters issued its annual Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2020 in early June. This year, the 160-document acts as a manifesto for the Japanese government to boost Japan’s financial and economic future through intellectual property in the “with/after corona” (COVID-19) world. This report (summarized in a 10-slide presentation also, Source no. 3) seeks to build on past strategy declarations (Society 5.0 and “Value Designing Society“) and get readers to consider how Japanese regions, corporations, universities, and innovators can work together to contribute to Japanese progress in the future.

A couple points the report brings out are that Japan needs to build up an innovation “infrastructure,” with governmental collaboration and support to corporations so as to push forward technological change.

The report points out that Japan has lagged behind other advanced countries in open sourcing and sharing of technology, but can and should use the push given by the open source movements aimed at fighting COVID-19 to change this.[p.5] More dramatically, the Report goes on to argue that now is the time for the government and society of Japan to press their advantages and overcome deficits to reach “Society 5.0” sooner than later, where more interactions and business take place online and information is more fully digitized.[pp.6-7]

The Report, which cannot be fully summarized in this article, touches on many needs for changes in education and law, saturation of IoT and AI in the economy, and greater exchange of ideas. Some proposals among many included making education more conducive to extraordinary creativity (“breaking free from average”); establishment of a digital infrastructure for monitoring farm-to-fork (and farm-to-foreign export) supply of food;　and advancing open sourcing of innovation in Japan.[pp. 12-13, 26, 31-32] The Report deals with promoting tourism and income related to it, suggesting the usefulness of increasing online content (in more languages) and virtual reality materials.[pp. 38-41] The latter half of the report breaks down action points and suggestions for various fields and actors mentioned in the earlier parts.

All in all, this report pushes for using technology in some ways rarely considered in Japan until the novel coronavirus epidemic. Now, the government sees this crisis as an opportunity to further make the shrinking population able to compensate for loss of workers (which it has been doing under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for some time) and damage to tourism done by COVID-19, by greater government involvement in a social evolution of sorts–laws, schools, financial support, and much collaboration would go into this. How will it go? The decades to come will show.

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Taro Yaguchi.

Sources

Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet. “知的財産推進計画２０２０ [Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2020].” http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/titeki2/kettei/chizaikeikaku20200527.pdf May 27, 2020. Accessed June 2, 2020.