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.

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.

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.

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.

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.