In new product development, incorporating user evaluations into product requirements is an important challenge. Particularly in highly specialized medical domains, it is difficult for corporate representatives to gain the same experience of use as users. Therefore, it is not easy to translate users’ practice-based knowledge into product requirements and secure the resources necessary to advance development. This paper clarifies how, under these constraints, corporate representatives guide users’ practice-based knowledge into a form that can be utilized in product development and achieve resource mobilization. To examine this issue, this paper analyzes a case study of the development of a surgical training model led by a medical device manufacturer. The analysis found that the corporate representative (broker) developed an “evaluation system” to derive generalizable product requirements from the diverse practice-based knowledge of surgeons, obtained through many years of observation in surgical settings. Existing research on network brokerage has explained that brokers play the role of connecting heterogeneous information, existing knowledge, and people. However, this paper elucidates the process by which brokers not only connect people and knowledge but also, through the medium of an evaluation system they have developed themselves, justify resource mobilization (technological collaboration and funding acquisition) and realize the product concept. Through this process, we present the dynamics of network brokerage, in which different actors are gradually connected through the evaluation system to realize the product concept.

This paper elucidates how the concept of “organizational capability”—which tends to fall into a tautology and for which it is difficult to establish a unified scale in academic empirical research—is used in the Japanese practical context. Therefore, we clarified the “meaning attributed to the concept of organizational capability” within Japanese Total Quality Management (TQM), which actively employed the term “organizational capability” to contribute to enhancing the international competitiveness of Japanese companies. As a result, it became evident that Japanese-style TQM standardized the “procedures” through which each company defines, implements, and evaluates organizational capability in accordance with its own context and not the “contents” of organizational capability itself. It also became clear that the organizational capability realized differs across companies. This can be viewed as a practical response by Japanese-style TQM to the research problem that assessing organizational capability retroactively based on outcomes tends to fall into a tautology. Therefore, in organizational capability research, rather than applying a uniform measure, it is necessary to carefully ascertain the organizational capability of each company through dialogue with practitioners while referencing standardized procedures.

Research on corporate misconduct is conducted from various fields. This paper addressed the three fields of legal, accounting, and management and organized and analyzed the research trends in each of these fields in an exploratory manner. In the legal and accounting fields, which are influenced by factors such as social institutional reforms, clear misconduct tends to be discussed from the perspectives of deterrence and detection. In contrast, in the management field, the focus tends to be on the structural issues of organizations and the psychology of the individuals involved in response to socially problematized misconduct. Therefore, even when observing a single case of corporate misconduct, the perspective differs depending on the field, and a gap exists. In situations of collaboration across disciplines, it is necessary to recognize and overcome the characteristics of each’s interests and perspectives.

This paper examines the case of sales departments of two companies that, driven by concerns over sales practices being dependent on individual ability and the resulting difficulty in training junior staff, enrolled in the same training program and undertook reforms that included standardizing their sales activities; however, they achieved sharply divergent outcomes. Company A focused on developing a sales kata and using role-playing exercises to master it; as a result, employees began to conduct their sales activities in line with standardized business processes instead of relying on individual experience and know-how. Company B focused on developing and disseminating detailed standardized operating procedures (SOPs); although there were short-term gains, the standard method failed to gain traction and a sales style dependent on individual skill persisted. These cases suggest that in complex operations such as sales, creating and mastering a kata, which functions as an exemplar while allowing for variation, is more effective than producing SOPs for promoting a standard method and embedding it as a new routine.

This paper examines the extent to which the internationalization of digital MNEs can be explained by conventional international business theory. In recent years, as digital MNEs have been able to enter international markets without establishing overseas offices, the need for new theories has been highlighted. Alibaba, the company discussed as a case study in this paper, was able to broker cross-border transactions without involving overseas offices by directly connecting suppliers in China and overseas consumers through AliExpress. However, as bottlenecks, such as rapid delivery and market response, became apparent, Alibaba began making foreign direct investments, such as developing global logistics networks and acquiring local e-commerce companies. This paper demonstrates that the explanatory power of new OLI and P-OLI is high during the cross-border EC phase, facilitating foreign market access, whereas the explanatory power of traditional OLI theory increases again during the subsequent international expansion.