Our Program

Junior Associate Professor, School of Health Innovation, Kanagawa University of Human Services

KUROKAWA Akio is Senior Manager, Center for Innovation Policy, Kanagawa University of Human Services. Previously, he was Associate Fellow, Research Institute of Science and Technology for Policy (RISTEX), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) , Postdoctoral Fellow at Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (MIGA) and Research Assistant at the Policy Alternatives Research Institute (PARI) of the University of Tokyo. He graduated from the Graduate School of Public Policy (GraSPP), the University of Tokyo.
His main areas of research interest are in Public Policy, Healthcare Innovation Policy and Science of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. He also serves as a Visiting Researcher at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS).

An important goal of this program is to reflect the research results in policy through research and development activities. It is not difficult to imagine that this challenge of "Policy Implementation" is extremely difficult compared to other “Social Implementation” challenges, since the target of implementation is mainly public activities such as government organizations.

So, how can we link our research results to real-world policy making process? In fact, there is no clear answer to this question, as the history and achievements of the various research and development projects adopted by this program so far show. There is no standard model to follow, no clear strategy to follow.
We believe that the most important asset of this program is the knowledge and expertise that emerges from the process of each R&D project as it tries to realize "policy implementation" through its own creativity and ingenuity. Of course, there will be many failures as well as successes.

In the policy making process for COVID-19, various issues were highlighted regarding the relationship between policy and science, and between politics and science. We have seen that good academic reputation and consensus among scientists and experts do not necessarily translate into actual decision making. We now need to clarify the conditions under which scientific knowledge can be utilized in the policy making process.

I would be happy to work with you in your research and development projects to find the answers to these questions.