The External Evaluation Committee (EEC) Meeting was held on 6th, March, 2016, chaired by T. Ikegami. The member list is as attached. Foreign members visited NIMS and AIST at Tsukuba on 4th. On 5th the EEC heard presentations from the Program Director (PD) and Program Officers (POs). In advance, an Activity Report had been prepared by the JST office and had been sent to members in January; completed Evaluation Reports by the EEC were returned to the JST by the end of February.
We started the EEC meeting (Chatham-House Role) on 6th with Revised Evaluation Reports from each member prepared after the Hearing on 5th.
We evaluated the ALCA Program from Research Outcomes, as well as the Scope, appropriateness of 8 Technology Areas for low carbon, and the management.
The Working Documents kindly prepared by the ALCA secretariat are attached.

Summary

We are positive about the unique ALCA program over its first 5 years of operation.
The scope is associated with global issues, environment and energy today and tomorrow. The Paris Agreement at COP21 opens up a new horizon for international action with clear and proactive targets. The ALCA program has the potential to make a significant contribution to Japan’s strategy for achieving the 2050 emissions reduction targets.
We understand that the ALCA focusses on the bases of science and technology with researchers and engineers in universities and public research institutes, exclusively. The evaluation of outcomes reported from the Activity Report and PO’s presentation is positive as expected but some of them are more good outputs rather than outcomes aiming at low carbon.
In the context of limited funding, we found that there is scope for merging some of the research activities, or transferring them to other Technology Areas. There is also a need to review ALCA Technology Areas to establish whether some could move from ALCA funding to the other more appropriate funding.
Regarding ALCA management, we strongly recognize that ALCA is conducted with strong leadership by the PD referring to the Stage-gate (SG) control for changing the mind-set of researchers. At the Stage Gates, Road-Map generation to provide benchmarks is important for helping the Gates proceed productively. Also PD and POs should note the risk of the SG process becoming bureaucratic and, discouraging young researchers and being too conservative in picking-up new research seeds. Balancing Top-down management and Bottom-up is interesting but the former should be applied even to emerging technical area and topics.
PD and POs should enhance face-to-face discussions to reinforce the ALCA low-carbon mission, and to follow already-disclosed roadmaps shared with industry and society domestically and internationally. One of effective drivers “Towards Commercialization” is to encourage the development of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and to develop a mindset of Entrepreneurship which is currently lacking in Japanese researchers.

Basic research, depending on academic discipline in process, is very important and ALCA should support the researchers to be “low-carbon inspired”. More Peer Review from specialists is effective and would be welcomed.
We feel concern that ALCA is too domestically-focused under MEXT in general. More collaboration with other institutes under other ministries, in particular NEDO under METI is to be encouraged. The ALCA mission is already shared globally, so International Cooperation/Collaboration is necessary to get prosperous outcomes beyond just outputs.
We find the ALCA budget is unsustainable (i.e. too low to deliver major impact) and recommend Government to increase it since the scope, research outcomes and management are proactive as a whole.