Establishing Galapagos Ke-tai’s Dominant Industrial Design

: The folding “clamshell” mobile phone was chosen as the dominant industrial design in the Japanese mobile phone industry due to the importance of mail functionality, and NEC actively pushed this style and acquired major market share. As a result, at the start of the 21st century, the dominant design “Galapagos ke-tai ,” unique to Japan, was established. However, this dominant industrial design along with the functionality of these phones became a barrier to the Japanese mobile phone industry when they shifted to smartphones. In other words, a dominant industrial design determined the competitive positions of companies.


Introduction
Japanese mobile phones evolved in a unique fashion through a process called "Galapagosization." As a result of this unique evolution, Japanese mobile phones are generally known as Galapagos ke-tai (ke-tai meaning "mobile phone" in Japanese). An examination of the appearance of these phones reveals that many of them are of the folding "clamshell" type. How did the clamshell design become so broadly accepted by the market, and how did this impact business management?
This paper reviews prior research and notes their limitation at first. Next, it analyzes the impact of choices of appearance on business management as a dominant design is formed, in this case, that of the Galapagos ke-tai. As a result, it points out the appearance of mail functionality through data communication services tied to the adoption of the folding clamshell type design. It also notes that while the folding type design was tied to changes in market leadership by NEC and Panasonic, this same type design led to delays in responding to later challenges from smartphones. Although there is an insufficient focus on dominant industrial design in existing research, this paper points out that a consideration of fit in function and appearance is important, and business management should focus on dominant industrial design.

Existing Research
Existing research notes that as industries grow and innovate, products that characterize subsequent products appear such as Ford's Model T. These designs are known as dominant designs (Abernathy, 1978;Abernathy & Utterback, 1978;Utterback, 1994). 1 1 See Akiike (2013) for a discussion of the creation of the A-U model. Dominant designs are formed in relation to market needs, which determine final structures and product parameters (Clark, 1985). There have been many studies on this in the field of technology management. However, while much of the existing research has debated the technological and functional sides of dominant design (e.g., Tushman & Anderson, 1986), little analysis has been on the appearance side of dominant design, or dominant industrial design (Akiike & Yoshioka-Kobayashi, 2017). Then, does dominant industrial design have an impact on the competitive position of firms just as it does on technology (e.g., Tushman & Anderson, 1986)? Moreover, how is appearance related to function?

The Case of the Japanese Mobile Phone Industry
The subject of this paper is the Japanese mobile phone industry. Japanese mobile phones evolved uniquely and rapidly, going from basic phones with minimum talk functionality to the unique dominant design that came to be known as the Galapagos ke-tai.

What is Galapagos ke-tai?
Galapagosization has been noted as an issue in Japanese manufacturing industries. The origin of the term is the evolution of the living thing in the Galapagos Islands. It means 1) unique product evolutions resulting from adaptation to the needs of Japanese domestic market and 2) that products are not accepted in global markets, and finally, the risk that global products will defeat them when global products enter the Japanese market arises (Miyazaki, 2008). 2 Galapagosization is said to have occurred in the Japanese mobile 2 The fundamental process is similar to that of Christensen (1997). phone industry (e.g., Miyazaki, 2008;Yoshikawa, 2010). Thus, Japanese mobile phones are known as Galapagos ke-tai (or, mobile phones created from Galapagosization). Altough, the definition of Galapagos ke-tai is included in feature phones, Galapagos ke-tai has some functions unique to Japan, such as FeliCa for NFC payments or One seg for TV broadcast reception. 3 In other words, Galapagos ke-tai is shared as a standard for function of Japanese mobile phones. Hence, these mobile phones can be viewed as a dominant design for Japanese mobile phones.

The history of Galapagos ke-tai's technological and functional improvement
Next, let us describe the process of Galapagosization for Japanese mobile phones and the history of how Galapagos ke-tai came to have these functions. Table 1 summarizes the development of Galapagos ke-tai's functionality. Initial wireless technology (1G) for mobile phones was analog (Kanzaki & Nishii, 2008). There was a shift to 2G in 1993 (Morishima, 2006), which was digital and allowed for better audio quality and lower power consumption (Kanzaki & Nishii, 2008). In addition, 2G allowed for data communication such as mail and internet access. This resulted in more telecommunications services, such as i-mode (1999), ezweb (1999), and J-sky (2000) (Kanzaki & Nishii, 2008). i-mode had a particularly large impact on data telecommunications services in Japanese mobile phones. A closer look at this service shows that companies selling models that were compatible with it were, in order of market release, Fujitsu  (Shirakura, 2003 in developing models in collaboration with NTT docomo, and this data telecommunications service was also hugely successful (Shirakura, 2003).
Japanese mobile phones continued to evolve. Color displays were first used by Fujitsu in the F502i HYPER. These displays allowed for internet viewing in color. To take advantage of the benefits of a color display, Sharp put a camera functionality in its J-SH04 model (Kikuchi, 2001). Later, Japanese mobile phones evolved in response to user needs, with such functions as music, FeliCa for NFC, and One seg for viewing television broadcasts. FeliCa was implemented in April 2004 by Panasonic, Sony Ericsson, Sharp, and Fujitsu, and

Which is Galapagos ke-tai's design?
Japanese mobile phones followed a unique evolution on the functional side, as discussed in the previous section. However, one cannot ignore the appearance side of Galapagos ke-tai. The Japanese mobile phone industry saw major changes in mainstream designs for mobile phones between basic phones and Galapagos ke-tai. Specifically, mainstream designs for mobile phones moved from a straight type design in the basic phone era (Figures 1 and 4) to the folding type design through Galapagosization (Figure 2). In 2001, the folding type design became dominant over the straight type design, and around 2002 and 2003 most mobile phone adopted the folding type design (Figure 7). Although, new designs appeared later, such as the rotating ( Figure 5) and slide type ( Figure 6) designs, the mainstream folding type design of the Galapagos ke-tai became more widespread (Figure 7). This can be seen by the use of the folding type design in many smartphones that have the appearance of a Galapagos ke-tai and which were known as "garaho" (short for "Galapagos phone"; e.g., the au website

NEC's challenge for establishing Galapagos ke-tai's dominant industrial design
This change in dominant industrial design was influenced by the efforts of NEC. They aggressively adopted the folding type design when data telecommunication services began to appear in 1999. When using mail, the number of characters that can be shown on a screen is critical, and a folding type design allows a larger screen (Shirakura, 2002). NEC saw mail functionality as becoming central to mobile phones in the future and therefore used the folding type design for its N50li HYPER (Figure 2), regardless of cost Note: These companies all had top market share at least once in the period noted in the graph. Source: Nikkei Sangyou Shimbun (1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010)  In addition to camera functionality, Sharp led out with FeliCa functionality ahead of NEC. And by going after both technological and functional aspects, it took over leadership in the market (Nikkei Sangyou Shimbun, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. This shows that the folding type design was adopted as a dominant industrial design as a result of responding to rapid functional development in accordance with uniquely Japanese needs.

The dilemma of folding type
The Japanese mobile phone industry adopted the folding type design as a dominant industrial design for Galapagos ke-tai, as functionally evolved in a unique fashion to respond to the Japanese needs. Galapagos ke-tai, with their uniquely functions and appearance, were highly competitive in the Japanese market. However, adoption of the folding type design caused major issues that manufacturers were slow to respond to smartphones for the industry.
When the iPhone came to Japan in 2008 (Mobile Content Forum 2010), the Japanese mobile phone industry was slow to catch on to smartphones ("KDDI syachou ni," 2010). This lag was impacted not only by functional aspects such as the use of FeliCa and One seg but also by appearance. Although, smartphones used a touchscreen for appearances, the Japanese mobile phone industry highly valued user interfaces such as keyboards used in traditional designs such as folding type designs (Okada & IT Media, 2008). They believed users would not use a mobile phone with a touchscreen. However, that ended up being a mistake ("KDDI syachou ni," 2010). In the unique functional evolutions of functions in Japan, the dominant industrial design that had been developed proved to be a major impediment to a shift to smartphones, even as the global products such as iPhone appears. In addition, changes in dominant industrial design were shown to be related to changes in function seen as important by consumers. Clark (1985) noted that product structure is determined by the consumer perspective. In addition, Wii (2003) pointed out that product architecture that regulates how products can be combined depends on the function seen as important. In other words, it has been shown that there is a close relationship between a product structure and functions deemed important by consumers. However, there have not been any discussions extending to industrial design. Based on the results of this paper, the aforementioned discussions can be applied to industrial design. If the product functions demanded by consumers change, it is highly likely that the ideal industrial design demanded by customers will also change. Existing research overlooks this point, and this paper makes a contribution for noting this point. As was pointed out by Sullivan (1956), there is a strong correlation between function and appearance.

Discussion and Conclusion
When discussing the importance of industrial design, one may envision the "coolness" of a product. However, the relation of industrial design to function is important, and industrial design also impacts competitiveness. A practical contribution of this paper is the suggestion that firms must create their own design strategies bearing in mind this relation with functionality.