Roles and practical challenges of universities for local communities as think tanks

There are major national and private universities along the railways from Shiga to Kobe, and the OIC-RU is strategically located at the central point of the belt of universities in the Kansai Metropolitan Area of Japan. GSPS-RU shall play the role of think tanks in the surrounding cities, utilizing their locational convenience. GSPS-RU will be able to effectively circulate human resources, administrative information, and academic knowledge as the core of local communities. Professors and students in GSPS have practical minds that can contribute to the co-creation of local communities, and this practicality should be more internationally applicable in the future. Universities generally play a role in the co-creation of local communities and should be utilized as think tanks by their surrounding municipalities. In this context, GSPS-RU may have enough resources with its own faculty?s interdisciplinary background, and these resources should be applied to the policy processes of local communities both from the private and public sectors? points of view