Abstract
It is an important action for adaptation to the hollowing out of industry to switch a customer or industry. In order to realize that, first of all, many people think up to switch of the business structure and the business model. However, we came across the SMEs which adapted to the hollowing out of industry without switching the business structure or the business model in a pre-field-research. Those companies arranged existing business routinely. In addition, they achieved switching of a customer or industry by repeating arrangements routinely. Which adaptation pattern is a mainstream as the actual situation for Japanese companies? In this paper, we introduce the result of the preliminary research for answering this question. We researched about 20 SMEs located in the Suwa region of Nagano prefecture. The 20 companies all experienced the hollowing out of industry 20 years ago. Moreover, those companies have survived on the same scale until now. Only ten companies adopted a pattern to switch business structure or business model. On the other hand, 19 of 20 companies adopted a pattern to arrange existing business routinely. Even if it takes fewness and deflection of the number of the samples into account, it is an extremely interesting result. In this paper, we suggest the possibility that there is the secret mainstream of an adaptation pattern for the hollowing out of industry of SMEs.
