Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
How the Japanese electrical industry reduced licensing costs after World War II
Koji Nakano
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JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2020 Volume 19 Issue 2 Pages 29-44

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Abstract

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.

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© 2020 Koji Nakano. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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