I. Introduction
| The Japan Health Science Foundation (JHSF) has 16 years of history since its establishment in April 1986. During the period, JHSF has ameliorated various difficult situations that the industries in the health science field had been facing through advanced and basic technologies, proceeding with its activities for improving public health and welfare in collaboration with government, academic and private sectors. The biotechnology was at its era of sudden rise in 1986 and as vectors of industry and government were in accord, the JHSF research projects, especially that of joint projects between public and private sectors, had been contributed to community as a new type of research unknown to the date. Recently, however, the other bodies are carrying a similar type of research projects and JHSF cannot remain with folded arms anymore. When turning the eyes to research projects, the new fields such as genomic drug discovery, proteomics, bioinformatics, regenerative medicine, toxicogenomics, or translational research are consecutively emerging, which intend a drastic change of the time. Simultaneously, the Japanese Government is proceeding with administrative reform that inevitably urges JHSF of its reform as one of the public utility foundations.
Meanwhile, under the stagnant Japanese economy, supporting member companies of JHSF are making utmost efforts for the survival in respective industry. The advanced and basic researches are developing rapidly, accompanying severe development competitions of new product. Since the most acute issue for enterprises is to secure their business and profitability. JHSF has to keep in pace with them by understanding such situation of our supporting members. The JHSF itself is facing the most difficult situation since its establishment due to the influence of the government's administrative reform and the fragile financial infrastructure of the Foundation itself. The JHSF has to execute radical reform by largely changing its existing management policy. Under these drastically changing circumstances, the JHSF has formulated the visions that could be a guideline for its future activities describing how it should be and how it should respond to social requirements in the future. This vision was formulated as a further development of the past visions in conformity with the time. Then JHSF is expected the vision should be recognized as a guideline for managing JHSF properly. |