Foreign Technology

Japan is often cited as a case study in the role that government can play in successfully collecting and disseminating information on foreign technology to both industry and government. After World War II, Japan solidified its technology base by importing foreign technology to supplement its own research and development. Such efforts have helped make Japan's economy the second largest in the world. This report focuses on U.S. and Japanese organizations that collect and distribute foreign technology information to customers in government, industry, and academia. GAO (1) describes the Japanese government's process for performing these tasks and contrasts it with the U.S. government's process; (2) presents the views of Japanese officials on the elements of successful foreign technology collection and dissemination; and (3) assesses the efforts of U.S. government organizations with offices in Japan that are doing this work.

GAO found that: (1) the Japanese government's process for collecting and disseminating foreign technology information is highly centralized, uses extensive networks between officials and researchers in government, industry, and academia, builds a consensus on what technologies to monitor, and uses considerable resources to collect and disseminate information for commercial purposes; (2) Japanese officials believe that most technology information is collected by private companies; (3) the U.S. government has a decentralized process that relies on civilian and defense government agencies to collect information pertinent to their missions and is primarily defense-oriented; (4) the Department of Commerce does not collect foreign technology information or coordinate activities; (5) Japanese officials believe that a successful technology information collecting and dissemination system includes determining and providing the foreign technology information that customers want and need, maintaining a cooperative government-industry relationship, treating technology monitoring as an integral part of an organization's operations, and locating operations in the target country; (6) few U.S. government organizations in Japan have reevaluated and revised their missions to reflect changes in international science and technology affairs; and (7) U.S. organizations' collection efforts are limited because they do not identify the demand for and usefulness of their information to potential customers, coordinate activities among various civilian and military offices, or provide appropriate background and language skills for its information collectors.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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