著者

Shumpei Iwao Yumi Kato

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.18, no.6, pp.251-262, 2019-12-15 (Released:2019-12-15)

参考文献数

18

被引用文献数

1 3

---

The keiretsu, or long-term stable business network that exists between Toyota and its suppliers, seems to demonstrate exceptional resilience in the face of natural disasters. Toyota shares production knowledge among the firms in its keiretsu through long-term kaizen-based inter-company learning activities (jishuken). In this regard, we have confirmed that (A) in times of normal operations, jishuken adopt a flat structure of interpersonal connections among firms that facilitates mutual trust. From case studies, we also found that (B) in times of disaster response, the structure “switches” to a hierarchical one with a clearly delineated leadership to bring knowledge and human resources into play.

著者

Takeyasu ICHIKOHJI Sotaro KATSUMATA

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0151214a, (Released:2016-03-11)

参考文献数

24

被引用文献数

1 6

---

Amateur creations are one source of Japan’s competitiveness in the content industry. This study summarizes prior research on amateur manga (comic), called doujinshi, in terms of its history and current status, overseas trends, gender aspects, and copyrights. This study then develops a research model with three hypotheses on the relationship between creation and monetization across multiple content categories. To test these hypotheses, an online survey of 2,593 individuals was conducted on the creation and monetization of manga and music. The survey’s findings were as follows: (1) Consumers who create works in one content category tend to do so in other categories. (2) Consumers who monetize their own work in one content category tend to do so in other categories. (3) Consumers who create works in multiple content categories tend to monetize their own works. This study also shows the current status of creation and monetization in Japanese manga and music.

著者

Kenichi Kuwashima

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0180314a, (Released:2018-06-01)

参考文献数

27

被引用文献数

12

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From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, major institutional reform was undertaken in Japan to promote university–industry collaboration. The term “university–industry collaboration” appeared frequently in the media and became a fad. However, this did not last long, and it peaked in 2003. University–industry collaboration entered the spotlight again after 2010, when “open innovation” (Chesbrough, 2003) became popular in Japan. At that time, a new type of university–industry collaboration emerged. University–industry collaboration in Japan has traditionally taken the form of “small-scale, short-term, individual” contracts. In contrast, this new type of collaboration features “large-scale, long-term, comprehensive” contracts.

著者

Hiroki KIKUCHI

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0160605a, (Released:2016-08-09)

参考文献数

17

被引用文献数

2 5

---

The Tokaido Shinkansen began operating in 1964 and ran at globally unprecedented speeds of more than 200 kmph. Comparison with the operating speed of aircraft necessitated further improvement of the operating speed of Shinkansen. Nevertheless, there was no improvement until 20 years. During that period, the maximum speed of test cars, the highest technically feasible speed, improved. Rather than technical factors, the following social and organizational factors impeded the improvement of the operating speed. (1) The social factor was the prioritization of environmental countermeasures to improvements in speed because of the noise pollution lawsuits and noise regulation. (2) The organizational factor was the need to secure the slack time due to frequent strikes and delays when Shinkansen was managed by Japan National Railways (JNR). However, around the time of the splitting and privatization of JNR in 1987, noise regulation was relaxed and lawsuits were settled. Furthermore, the labor movement settled down with the privatization of JNR; consequently, labor unions were dismantled. These events resolved preventive factors and led to the improvement of operating speeds.

著者

Masayuki Hatta

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.19, no.6, pp.277-292, 2020-12-15 (Released:2020-12-15)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

3 9

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Recently, online black markets and anonymous virtual currencies have become the subject of academic research, and we have gained a certain degree of knowledge about the dark web. However, as terms such as deep web and dark net, which have different meanings, have been used in similar contexts, discussions related to the dark web tend to be confusing. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the differences between these concepts in an easy-to-understand manner, including their historical circumstances, and explain the technology known as onion routing used on the dark web.

著者

Tatsuya Yoshida

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.20, no.1, pp.19-32, 2021-02-15 (Released:2021-02-15)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

10

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The workcation, wherein people combine work with vacation, is a concept that originated in the United States and Europe with the spread of information and communications technology (ICT). Although it is considered a workstyle for independent people as epitomized by freelancers and the like, in Japan, the term has come to convey something different from its original meaning, taking a unique direction in which some types of training programs are referred to as workcation. How did this change come about? This study, based on surveys of three regions, examines the origin and development of satellite office workcation and learning workcation to ascertain the following. (1) In Japan, people with workcation are assumed to be employees. (2) Therefore, the workcation is heavily influenced by local governments' intentions (wanting to associate with exchange populations) and companies' intentions (it is difficult to dispatch employees to outlying areas without a work-related purpose). (3) Therefore, the workcation has evolved into something that aims to enhance creativity, learning, and introspection through close ties with communities.

著者

Tatsuya Yoshida

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0210112a, (Released:2021-02-10)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

10

---

The workcation, wherein people combine work with vacation, is a concept that originated in the United States and Europe with the spread of information and communications technology (ICT). Although it is considered a workstyle for independent people as epitomized by freelancers and the like, in Japan, the term has come to convey something different from its original meaning, taking a unique direction in which some types of training programs are referred to as workcation. How did this change come about? This study, based on surveys of three regions, examines the origin and development of satellite office workcation and learning workcation to ascertain the following. (1) In Japan, people with workcation are assumed to be employees. (2) Therefore, the workcation is heavily influenced by local governments' intentions (wanting to associate with exchange populations) and companies' intentions (it is difficult to dispatch employees to outlying areas without a work-related purpose). (3) Therefore, the workcation has evolved into something that aims to enhance creativity, learning, and introspection through close ties with communities.

著者

Jing-Ming SHIU Masanori YASUMOTO

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, no.5, pp.239-250, 2016-10-15 (Released:2016-10-16)

参考文献数

26

被引用文献数

4 3

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The open source community (OSC) is a place to develop collective knowledge available to anyone, thereby inevitably engendering free riders. Despite this, many firms have contributed to OSCs. This study examines 10 Android smartphone manufacturers between 2010 and 2013 with regard to their (a) source code contributions and the relation of those contributions to (b) time to market as measured by the release of their first Android smartphones. The results of the analysis are divided into the following two groups: (A) a group that released smartphones faster than their competitors through source code contributions and (B) a group that made few source code contributions and was slower to release smartphones than group (A). In addition, in a few years, some firms were observed to have move from group (B) to group (A).

著者

Wei Huang

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0180921a, (Released:2018-10-11)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

7

---

In existing research on new product development, it has been believed that the product development by companies needs to reflect the changes in customer needs. Particularly, for products in which continual development is a characteristic, customer needs must be addressed at multiple points in time. However, by comparing the cases of two companies from the online game industry, we found that long-term performance of a company which responded flexibly suffered a drop, with the ratio of new users dropping and the user attrition rate increasing. Therefore, we believed that too much attention was paid to the requests of lead users.

著者

Masamichi OGAMI

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, no.4, pp.187-197, 2016-08-15 (Released:2016-08-15)

参考文献数

12

被引用文献数

4

---

This paper employs data on patent applications for the glass industry’s float process from 1954 through 2015. Furthermore, it assesses whether the S-curve of technological progress emerges. Assigning time to the horizontal axis, something like the S-curve emerges in the US and Europe but not in Japan. The S-curve represents the physical limits of technology. Specifically, Foster (1986) defined the S-curve as the function that expresses the relation between the amount of effort expended toward performance improvement and its outcome. The magnitude of the effort expended depends on the company as well as social factors. This paper performs company-level analysis using actual data to examine (1) the extent to which companies respond to the demands of the market and (2) the effect of the grant-back clauses in licensing agreements suggested by Ogami (2015).

著者

Sungwoo BYUN

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0160531a, (Released:2016-07-20)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

1 7

---

Once a company begins its development process, putting products into the market as quickly as possible to get a return on investment is the fundamental corporate activity. A product’s time to market can be categorized into the development time for the product and production processes and production ramp-up time. Existing studies have focused on reducing development time by primarily increasing efficiency. However, no matter how much a company shortens its development time, there may be a delay in the return on investment if production ramp-up takes too much time. This paper analyzes the processes of Hyundai Steel, a major Korean steel manufacturer. Moreover, it examines the process of its implementation of blast furnace technology through mass production. The company used a strategy that maximized the learning effect by implementing three blast furnaces with the same specifications in succession and without delay. They planned to implement the blast furnaces with no overlap in the implementation schedule, which enabled the same ramp-up team to start up production successively. Thus, the team was able to leverage the experience gained in ramping up one blast furnace for ramp-ups of subsequent blast furnaces. This learning effect enabled them to successfully reduce the ramp-up time linearly, as shown on a semilog graph.

著者

Mizuki KOBAYASHI

出版者

グローバルビジネスリサーチセンター・東京大学MERC

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, no.2, pp.105-117, 2016-04-15 (Released:2016-04-15)

参考文献数

22

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Dalian, China, has been noted for its software industrial agglomeration. Many studies have mentioned Silicon Valley, the archetypal high-tech industrial agglomeration, stating that companies gained the necessary resources by becoming familiar with the flexible business practices in the region. This is conventional wisdom. However, such a trend is barely found in Dalian. Much of the business of Dalian’s software industry is related to Japan, and a strong influence of Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs) exists. Key enterprises within the industrial agglomeration adopt Japanese companies’ managerial system and then be able to gain business from their Japanese clients. In other words, even though both are high-tech industrial agglomerations, in Silicon Valley, companies were required to become familiar with local business practices to acquire resources, while in Dalian, local key enterprises were required to take on business practices of their customer MNEs to gain resources. Thus, it is not easy to make generalizations about high-tech industrial agglomeration models based on the case of Silicon Valley, which may, in fact, be a special case.

著者

Qiwei Liu Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.20, no.2, pp.63-78, 2021-04-15 (Released:2021-04-15)

参考文献数

33

---

The survey of Chinese employees working for Japanese companies and graduating from universities in China revealed that factors such as intercultural gap, Japanese ability, and workplace human relations have limited correlation with the 4-faceted motivation scores. The existence of career perspectives did however appear to relate to motivation scores including learning. The reason for low motivation scores of Chinese employees derived from the fact that they had limited opportunities for participating in job fairs during their job search, or communicating with senior employees. Due to the absence of a career perspective, employees were dissatisfied with their day-to-day work after joining the companies.

著者

Masayuki Hatta

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.21, no.5, pp.91-102, 2022-10-15 (Released:2022-10-15)

参考文献数

14

---

In the world of open source constructed on the basis of the Unix philosophy, there are cases of unsung heroic programs in obscure locations being maintained in a detailed way by a single unknown person or a small number of unknown people, mainly for personal reasons. However, if once these small programs close to the bottom rung of the ladder break, it may cause a loss of balance and collapse of our entire modern infrastructure. This is referred to as the Nebraska Problem in this paper. We can see from the actual and serious case of the Heartbleed bug that “the number of eyeballs” taken for granted in Linus's Law up to this point needs to be proactively secured, and we need to consider complementary measures, such as SBOM, against risk in advance.

著者

Atsushi Akiike Tohru Yoshioka-Kobayashi Sotaro Katsumata

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0190908a, (Released:2019-10-26)

参考文献数

29

被引用文献数

2

---

Eisenman (2013) argues that the importance of design innovation increases in the early and late stages of an industry and is lowest in the middle stage. In response, this study empirically examines her proposition through an examination of mobile phones during the feature phone era (1999–2008) when various types of designs were being generated using design patent data. We analyze the number of mobile phone design patents registered before the current advent of smart phones as well as examining the yearly averages of forward citations (the number of times a particular design patent is cited in later design patents) and backward citations (the number of times a particular design patent cites previous design patents). Further, to shed light on interactions with an accumulation of design-related technology, the study also analyzes the number of design-related patent applications per year. Results reveal that while there was an increase in the number of design patents registered in the late stage of the industry, especially between the years of 2007–2008, the average number of forward citations drops below the average number of backward citations from 2003 onward. In other words, although at the late stages of the industry many design innovations emerged, most of these were incremental changes that followed past designs. In contrast, design-related patent applications reached a peak in 2004 and fell thereafter. It is hypothesized that this trend was influenced by the growing number of design-related patents that facilitated the easy generation of new variations in design. These results show the dilemma: Although design innovations continue to be generated over time by accumulating design-related technology, creating genuinely impactful design innovation becomes more difficult as time progresses. The study therefore demonstrates the difficulty of realizing Eisenman (2013)’s theoretical proposition.

著者

Takeaki Wada

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.17, no.1, pp.1-10, 2018-02-15 (Released:2018-02-15)

参考文献数

16

被引用文献数

4

---

A strategy that uses the productive performance of a manufacturing site (or genba), noted as a strength of Japan’s manufacturing industry by Fujimoto (2003), might also be called a capability-based cost leadership strategy (CBCL strategy). In the 1990s, this strategy ceased to function due to environment changes, and the international competitiveness of Japan’s manufacturing industry declined. As a means of breaking through those circumstances, Fujimoto emphasized strengthening market performance and choosing a differentiation strategy for appealing to consumers based on high product quality. In the end, however, the performance of Japan’s manufacturing industry is restored after the environment changed to become favorable to a CBCL strategy such as rising labor costs in newly developing countries and a shift to a weaker yen. This suggests that many Japanese manufacturers could not shift to differentiation strategies based on enhanced competitiveness in the market, and CBCL strategies were left in place.

著者

Masayuki Hatta

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.19, no.4, pp.143-157, 2020-08-15 (Released:2020-08-15)

参考文献数

19

被引用文献数

1 7

---

Creating new products by incorporating new and original ideas derived from learning the internal mechanisms and structures of machines and other objects at hand through the process of repairing or tinkering with them is fundamental to the innovation, which is a staple of human existence. Recently, however, increasing product complexity, technical constraints, and regulations have gradually narrowed the scope of the user's ability to tinker. This aspect has given momentum to the movement to explicitly reclaim the Right to Repair and the Right to Tinker. This paper thus outlines the process that led to recognition of the importance of these rights.

著者

Ayako Aizawa

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0190725a, (Released:2019-08-09)

参考文献数

12

被引用文献数

2

---

An organization is said to be in an activated state if “(1) the members have a common purpose and (2) they are actively willing to contribute action to accomplish this common purpose” (Takahashi, 1992). Problem solvers that fulfill requirements (1) and (2) play an active role in an activated state. At Company A, which is discussed in this paper and was in a crisis with its performance, employees demonstrated initiative to activate the organization by pursuing Product Identity rather than corporate identity with regard to (1) above. Moreover, this activation started to expand to other companies because of its nature as Product Identity.

著者

Takeaki Wada

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0181119b, (Released:2019-02-07)

参考文献数

24

被引用文献数

2

---

Many small and medium-sized enterprises' managers hesitate to launch new businesses for the diversification or business change. In the case of new business launching by Yamato Industrial and Yamaguchi Kasei, decline of their existing businesses was a threat, and simultaneously, it has become an opportunity for launching new business, just as the saying “tough times bring opportunity.” In addition, the experience of launching a second business, rather than experience at startup, will motivate managers to launch businesses continuously.

著者

Atsushi Akiike Sotaro Katsumata

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0180912a, (Released:2018-10-13)

参考文献数

47

被引用文献数

4

---

The word “Galapagos” has garnered attention in Japan as an explanation for the loss of global competitiveness by the Japanese economy and Japanese companies, even while the Japanese companies are competitive domestically. The term has particularly been used with mobile phones in Japan, which are known as “Galapagos ke-tai.” An analysis of newspaper articles showed that discussions on Galapagos mobile phones were primarily about technology, technology standards, and features. However, smartphones that looked like Galapagos ke-tai came to be called “Garaho” later, and the term Galapagos then took on the meaning of appearance.