著者

Kiyohiro Oki

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200721a, (Released:2020-09-09)

参考文献数

23

被引用文献数

5

---

This paper identifies the national factors related to the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths in each country using the CAGE framework in the international business field. Multiple regression analyses are conducted at multiple time points, with the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 in each country as the dependent variables and cultural factors, administrative and political factors, geographic factors, and economic factors of each country as the independent variables. The analyses reveal the following four points: (1) The cultural, geographical, and economic factors are not significantly associated with the number of COVID-19 infections or deaths. (2) The Administrative and political factors (corruption, government information policy) are negatively associated with the number of COVID-19 infections. (3) None of the factors are associated with the number of COVID-19 deaths. (4) The significance of the correlation between independent and dependent variables changes with time.

著者

Suolinga Suolinga Heejin Kim

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200804a, (Released:2020-09-03)

参考文献数

29

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This paper intends to understand the overseas business expansion of a Japanese SME that is facilitated by strategic management of technical interns (TIs), a type of foreign migrant labor in Japan. We challenge the current prejudices and narrow view on the role of TIs by introducing a unique case wherein a rural SME utilized TIs as strategic human resources. Furthermore, we highlighted the positive influence of TIs on the gradual insiderization in foreign markets and development of new business opportunities.

著者

Kenichi Kuwashima Nobuyuki Inamizu Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200621a, (Released:2020-08-03)

参考文献数

42

被引用文献数

5

---

The concept of ambidexterity and particularly the concept of exploitation are ambiguous. March (1991), a study that became the theoretical basis for several research studies, asserted that exploitation has a trade-off relationship with exploration including innovation, and on the basis of this aspect, Levinthal and March (1993) proposed the myopia of learning. Nevertheless, Levinthal later modeled exploitation that can be called as innovation. Some argued that exploration and exploitation are bipolar on one axis, and some argued that they are two orthogonal axes. In this study, we proposed using Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” instead of “exploitation.” This bricolage is a concept of making do with the tools and materials at hand (performing innovation), and bricolage and exploration are used together with ambidexterity being the normal form. We examine this aspect by using Japan’s response to the current Coronavirus disease pandemic as an example.

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

vol.19, no.3, pp.111-125, 2020-06-15 (Released:2020-06-15)

参考文献数

24

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Fuel economy competition has heated up as a result of the oil crises of the 1970s, the environmental issues occurring since the 1990s, and the Japanese government’s economic policies, so that fuel economy has become a key competition index. However, for engineers who measure fuel economy, it is (i) a vague and unstable metric that fluctuates because of a number of factors and (ii) a quality that does not affect safety and so is not subject to recall. Competitive pressure regarding fuel economy led to arbitrary measurements. This eventually became normalized, and since 2016, cases of organizational corruption in the Japanese automotive industry have been uncovered one after another.

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.0200429a, (Released:2020-06-11)

参考文献数

12

被引用文献数

2

---

Company A’s Project R is a freemium-model game business wherein the company makes money by (a) obtaining a large number of users who play its game essentially for free and (b) converting a small number of them into paying users. In Project R, paying ability boosting items were added to increase profits. Doing this initially increased monthly sales by 20%; however, after two months, the playing time of existing non-paying users declined, and more new non-paying users abandoned the game as well. It seems that the addition of paying ability boosting items could shorten a game’s life span by destroying the balance between (a) and (b) and causing a long-term decline in revenue. This paper runs a simulation to verify this.

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.0200422a, (Released:2020-06-05)

参考文献数

30

被引用文献数

3

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Large-scale university–industry collaborations that are worth some 10 billion yen and run for 10 years have begun to appear in Japan since the mid-2010s. This paper focuses on the drug development project being conducted by Chugai Pharmaceutical Co, Ltd. and Osaka University, which is a pioneering case of this kind of collaboration, and explores the background of how this project came to be. For the companies involved in university–industry collaborations, the most important point for consideration is generally whether or not they will achieve results (from the university’s contributions) that are sufficient to justify their investment. For Chugai Pharmaceutical, the deciding factor in making its 10-billion-yen investment was that Osaka University had been selected for the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and had built up research capabilities to make a sufficient contribution to Chugai. In that sense, we could say that this collaboration came into being because of the government’s support in building the innovation base and because of switching over from government sponsorship to corporate sponsorship after the operation of the base was on track. This so-called government-support-based, large-scale university–industry collaboration is a potential role model for university–industry collaborations in the future.

著者

Nobuyuki Inamizu

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200317a, (Released:2020-04-12)

参考文献数

13

被引用文献数

1

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This study shows that it is possible to use position information to estimate the volume of communication in offices to some degree based on (1) office position information from sensing technology and (2) data from daily questionnaires from a survey of 308 employees in a corporate office. The relationship between the office environment and communication has come to the fore in recent years, and the findings of this study suggest how communication within an office can be estimated for a large sample at a low cost.

著者

Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200227a, (Released:2020-04-04)

参考文献数

67

被引用文献数

3

---

Since the 1990s, simulation and organizational studies have been conducted in Japan. In this paper, we review the simulation and organizational studies in Japan, including the relationships between researchers. The global trend is to cite the results of simulation studies as metaphors. By contrast, in Japan, there are unique research groups which critically examine the existing models, perform simulations, and further test them against survey data. The lessons they learned are: (a) The animation of the simulation results stir the imagination of researchers and business persons. However, (b) if the phenomena indicated by simulation and the reality of parameter values are not supported by the survey data, the implications derived from simulation are no more than a delusion.

著者

Koji Nakano

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191220a, (Released:2020-03-10)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

2

---

This paper reexamines product development in the Japanese electrical industry after WWII from the perspective of strategies for reducing licensing costs. Immediately after the war, Japanese electronics manufacturers raised their own level of technology by introducing technology from abroad. However, in their effort to arrive at corporate policies enabling them to provide products at as low a price as possible, there was a limit to the sheer amount of licensing costs they could bear to carry out licensed production. Japanese electronics manufacturers, in many cases, engaged in cross-licensing based on their own patents in order to offset licensing fees and keep costs down. To further control licensing costs, manufacturers had no choice but to produce products based on licenses already in hand; each electronics manufacturer established a central R&D laboratory. Up until the early 1990s, “Not Invented Here” was a widely adopted philosophy which, as it turns out, was a historically unique approach.

著者

Takashi Bui

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200107a, (Released:2020-02-11)

参考文献数

19

被引用文献数

1

---

Following the example of the United States, Japanese companies have been appointing more independent outside directors in recent years. Independent outside directors are regarded as playing a key role in determining executive compensation and other managerial oversight functions. Prior research mostly supports this idea with respect to U.S. corporations. However, some studies are more skeptical. Therefore, in response to a prior study on U.S. corporations by Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2009), this paper takes a sample of 322 Japanese non-financial corporations in the TOPIX 500 index that met certain criteria and analyzes the effect that having more independent directors has had on executive compensation. However, unlike in prior studies, we did not observe a statistically significant effect. In fact, we saw that executive compensation levels were affected more by the structure of executive remuneration that is determined across a company as a whole than by the composition of its board of directors.

著者

Yuki Mitomi Youngkyo Suh Hidenori Sato

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191111a, (Released:2020-01-11)

参考文献数

12

---

Japanese whisky now ranks as one of the five major whiskies in the world, but how did it come about? Suntory, which has won several prizes in international competitions since the beginning of the 21st century, was making many types of component whisky in the 1980s, when it was trying to deal with diversifying consumer needs and suffered from declining whisky sales. Ironically, these various malts led to the production of many high-quality blended whiskies, which are now winning prizes in international competitions.

著者

Takeyasu Ichikohji

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191018a, (Released:2019-12-13)

参考文献数

22

被引用文献数

1

---

When a market grows and matures so that its product becomes commoditized, we can usually expect product prices to decline due to price competition. However, in the digital camera market, although prices started to decline after they first went on sale, camera prices then began to rise. This was not because mass consumers shifted from the low-priced segment to the high-priced segment. Prices went up across all segments of the market. (A) In the low-priced segment, companies making low-priced products exited the market, and the remaining companies raised their prices by focusing on higher-quality products. (B) In the higher-priced segment, the number of major makers started declining, and prices steadily rose because products priced close to the highest-class products were released into the market. (C) In the mid-priced segment, two types of companies entered the market: companies in the low-priced segment that had developed higher-quality products and companies in the high-priced segment that added mid-priced products as alternatives.

著者

Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191117a, (Released:2019-12-13)

参考文献数

13

---

Japan’s prewar railroad business (Ministry of Transport) was transferred to a public corporation, Japanese National Railways (JNR), after World War II and eventually went bankrupt. This was due to a number of factors, including the decline in the position of railroads, ballooning personnel costs, and the existence of unprofitable local lines. However, the issue that directly caused the crash was the failure of the financing scheme that formed part of the company’s third long-term plan, which commenced in FY 1965. The company had not taken government subsidies or increased its borrowings from the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (FILP), but instead went outside the FILP and issued large volumes of high-interest rate tokubetsu (special) bonds without a government guarantee, so that by FY 1967, interest and debt-related expenses totaled 101.2 billion yen, or about the same as the 104 billion yen raised by tokubetsu bonds. In other words, tokubetsu bonds were being issued to finance the payment of interest on railway bonds. As a result, the company went bankrupt in the first few years of its seven-year plan, which changed into a financial rehabilitation plan starting in FY 1969.

著者

Seungkee Min

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191025a, (Released:2019-12-06)

参考文献数

29

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Does keiretsu in the Japanese automotive industry vary by company in terms of firm performance and strategic behavior? This paper classifies parts-supply keiretsu into (1) Toyota suppliers and non-Toyota suppliers and (2) Nissan suppliers and non-Nissan suppliers and then conducts a comparative analysis of the suppliers to test differences in (a) firm performance, (b) customer scope, and (c) product diversity. The following results emerge from the analysis: (a) in regard to “firm performance (return on sales),” Toyota suppliers outperformed non-Toyota suppliers, but there was no difference between Nissan suppliers and non-Nissan suppliers; (b) with respect to “customer scope,” both Toyota suppliers and Nissan suppliers outperformed non-Toyota suppliers and non-Nissan suppliers, respectively; (c) as for “product diversity,” Toyota suppliers have less product diversity than non-Toyota suppliers, but there was no difference between Nissan suppliers and non-Nissan suppliers. These results indicate that the strategic behavior of Toyota suppliers differs from that of Nissan suppliers in that Toyota suppliers achieve high profitability by broadening customer scope and simultaneously narrowing product diversity. While prior research on keiretsu has not focused attention on the differences among keiretsu, the finding of this paper provides suggestive evidence that strategic behavior may vary across keiretsu member firms.

著者

Sungwoo Byun

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191002a, (Released:2019-11-20)

参考文献数

13

被引用文献数

3

---

Tolerance is defined as “the difference between the maximum and minimum dimensions that can be allowed in terms of product functionality.” Company A, a steel manufacturer, follows the textbooks in presetting and managing tolerances so that its processes can flow seamlessly without any adjustments, as long as conditions remain within the range of tolerance. However, tolerance stack-up risk has been observed in the production of high-grade products such as automotive steel sheets because the quality measurements have approached the tolerance limits in several consecutive processes even though the said measurements have stayed within the tolerance range (which means that the products are not classified as defective). On the other hand, Company B (also a steel manufacturer) has been successful in managing tolerance through a method that is entirely different from the textbook model by having its Integrated Quality Control Group adjust the tolerances between processes and adopting strict controls that almost amount to integrated management.

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.18, no.5, pp.195-208, 2019-10-15 (Released:2019-10-15)

参考文献数

20

被引用文献数

6

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Retail prices must be kept low in order to increase the diffusion of home video game hardware. In the 1980s and 1990s, when high-performance semiconductor prices were high, the performance of the hardware was limited. Owing to hardware restrictions, Japanese video game hardware developers had to improve their ability to increase the entertainment offered by their hardware. By the 2000s, home video game hardware that was the same spec as cutting-edge PC hardware came onto the market. As a result, consumers in the European and North American markets began to demand home video game software that could take advantage of high-performance hardware. This is when European and North American home video game developers began to flourish, as their experience with video game development on the PC meant that they had the ability to develop games that took advantage of high-level hardware functionality. At the same time, Japanese home video game developers were struggling in the global market, including North America, because the development organization and capabilities that they had built before 2000 acted as core rigidity.

著者

Yufu Kuwashima

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.5, pp.183-194, 2019-10-15 (Released:2019-10-15)

参考文献数

21

被引用文献数

1

---

There are fundamental differences between research into WOM (word-of-mouth), in which communication occurs face-to-face, and one into eWOM (electric word-of-mouth), which occurs over the Internet between strangers. In specifically looking at motivational factors, this study reveals significant differences in that while traditional WOM studies mainly discuss recipient motives, eWOM studies (a) mainly discuss sender motives and (b) permit the inclusion of economic motives.

著者

Youngkyo Suh Yuki Mitomi Hidenori Sato

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.5, pp.171-181, 2019-10-15 (Released:2019-10-15)

参考文献数

18

被引用文献数

2

---

In recent years, global demand for Japanese whisky has been growing. Venture Whisky, a Japanese venture launched in 2004, is a born-global company exporting whiskies since 2006. It was able to win born-global status through resource-based venturing. Although the founder did not inherit assets or control of his family business, he recovered 400 casks of whisky that had once passed into other hands and was able to establish his business with these 400 casks as its basis. It was this “resource-based venturing” that proved to be a critical factor in the company’s success. That is to say, businesses that start with some sort of resource basis have a higher success potential than those starting from scratch, and sticking with succession of the existing business would have hardly led to success. The very key to this success is in resource-based venturing.

著者

Mitsuhiro Fukuzawa

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.5, pp.149-170, 2019-10-15 (Released:2019-10-15)

参考文献数

75

被引用文献数

2

---

Papers on operations management in major journals have studied (1) relationships between the level of alignment in business and manufacturing strategies, practice realization, and performance; (2) the role of plants in global production networks; and (3) the reconciling of business and manufacturing strategies by operational executives. However, while these studies have positioned the role of plants as a strategic weapon in firms, their perspective is that the role of plants is imparted by headquarters or business units. Actually, the phenomenon which Japanese domestic plants have continued to work on various issues in an advanced manner from a global view went beyond this scope. There is a need for exploratory research from the perspective of plants as to the relationship between the role of plants and the strategic behavior of factory managers in continuing to grow while trying to survive in challenging environments and organizational capabilities built in plants.

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.0190621a, (Released:2019-07-25)

参考文献数

13

被引用文献数

2

---

In case of products under continuous development, such as mobile games, (a) the development workload for bug fixing is accompanied by (b) the development workload of new content, which exhausts development teams. This paper examined a case of a company where (a) some developers suffered exhaustion while responding to bugs pointed out by users. However, many of the bugs were related to specific events and items. Thus, the company chose not to include the bug fixes in quick updates as long as they were not emergencies related to the game system. In addition, (b) initially PvE (Player versus Environment) content comprised 70% of the new content, whereas PvP (Player versus Player) content comprised 30%. However, the consumption of PvE content was faster than originally estimated, resulting in exhaustion of the development team. By contrast, PvP content was generated primarily by users, and additions to content were not frequent, although considerable time was needed to validate the content. For validation, simulations of portions of user fights were conducted, which indicated reduction of time by approximately 35%; in addition, the ratios of PvE and PvP content were changed to 40% and 60%, respectively. Through (a) and (b), the feeling of exhaustion experienced by the development teams was ameliorated, and by increasing the proportion of PvP, which had a high social component, the company succeeded in acquiring new users and monetizing existing paid users.