2020 年 12 巻 1 号 p. 41-57
Automobile manufacturers including Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) are struggling to not only change their strategies but also reconfigure their resources in order to survive the “war” against Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) in facing a once-in-a-century stage of innovation in the automotive industry called CASE—namely, connected cars (C), autonomous vehicles (A), share driving (S), and electric cars (A).
The objective of this paper is to assess the progress of Toyota’s survival strategy concentrating on connected cars based on the theory of dynamic managerial capabilities (DMC) developed in Kawai (2018a, 2018b) and the framework of dynamic platform strategy developed in Kawai (2019a, 2019b).
First, a typology of the possible defense strategies of Toyota was deduced based on examination of existing research concerning the theme. Then, the locus of Toyota’s efforts for defense was sketched and the company’s intermediary performance was assessed in reference to the above typology. Finally, evaluation shows that Toyota’s performance assessed by the extent of progress in measures taken is not necessarily poor as of today albeit there are substantial concerns, but it is too difficult to predict a final outcome.
