The UK higher education sector raised its profile and laid the groundwork for ongoing collaboration with Japanese industry, as well as government and higher education institutions, during a fortnight packed with diverse activities that brought us into contact with many of Japan’s top companies.

First off was a Global Skills Development Symposium, hosted in partnership with UK Trade and Industry. Its aim was to take advantage of the recent surge of interest in this topic, and to showcase the contributions that UK education institutions and service providers can make to this agenda. 323 participants attended the day-long symposium - the highest number ever for an education-related symposium by either the British Council or the British Embassy in Japan – demonstrating that this is indeed the issue of the day. The majority of participants were from Japanese companies, looking for hints on how to internationalise their staff. Enzo Raimo, Director of the International Office at the University of Nottingham, talked about Nottingham’s strategy for internationalising their staff and students, while various universities introduced courses focussed on global skills development. Several participants expressed interest in the Global TIES distance learning programme for students and young professionals developed jointly by the British Council and the University of Warwick. Overall, the symposium allowed us to introduce UK education to a wide range of companies with whom we had not previously had any contact, and so to establish a basis on which to develop further opportunities for UK institutions.

The following week, Dr David Docherty, CEO of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, and Dr Janet Metcalfe, Chair and Head of Vitae, visited Tokyo for the annual conference of the Business-University Forum of Japan. They had been invited to introduce the UK’s activities in the areas of innovation and researcher development at this distinguished gathering of leaders from Japan’s top universities and companies, alongside Nobel Prize winners and company presidents, due to the strong links that we had developed with the steering group of the BUF through our bilateral university-industry partnership, RENKEI. The previous day, the BUF took the initiative to organise a round table discussion with David, Janet, and a hand-picked selection of their members. This was a rare opportunity for us to introduce the UK’s initiatives in young researcher skills development and university-industry links to leaders from companies such as Toyota, Hitachi and Nissan. We are now working on a proposal to establish a policy-level task force on international university-industry collaboration which came directly out of this discussion.

While in Tokyo, David and Janet also met with various policy-makers and representatives of industry. David was invited to give a presentation to a working group on university-industry-government collaboration at Keidanren (Japan’s leading industrial organisation), providing a further opportunity to showcase UK initiatives to Japanese industry. Keidanren members were excited to discover various shared challenges, such as how to build stronger links between education and industry through an expansion and systematization of internships. They have since approached us for further information on UK education reform. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is showing strong interest in developing universities’ public engagement, and the representatives we met are hoping to find out more about UK initiatives such as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

This series of activities enabled us to develop several new connections in particular with Japanese industry, a sector of growing importance for UK higher education institutions working in Japan but which it has hitherto been difficult for us to reach. Moreover, the interest showed by these contacts, as well as those from Japanese government and higher education, in UK policy and practice in a broad range of areas demonstrates that there is strong potential for us, in partnership with the British Embassy, to showcase UK experiences and thus create further openings for collaboration with UK institutions.