Only a small portion out of –200 steel-makers in the world can produce high-grade steel such as hot-dip galvanized steel sheets and directional electrical steel sheets. For equipment-related industry such as steel industry, technical knowledge is embodied in their equipment; thus, technology transfer and catch-up are somewhat easy. However, for high-grade steel production, steel-makers in emerging countries equipped with large-scale capital investment and state-of-the-art equipment capital investment continued to struggle. The reason for this is when a new process is added to the existing process and not just the added process, the operational parameters of all processes must be coordinated. Thus, when a number of processes increases, it leads to a massive number of combinations of operational parameters to be coordinated, thus requiring time to acquire knowledge patterns.

Recently, online black markets and anonymous virtual currencies have become the subject of academic research, and we have gained a certain degree of knowledge about the dark web. However, as terms such as deep web and dark net, which have different meanings, have been used in similar contexts, discussions related to the dark web tend to be confusing. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the differences between these concepts in an easy-to-understand manner, including their historical circumstances, and explain the technology known as onion routing used on the dark web.

In extant studies regarding value stream mapping (VSM) and cross-functional integration in Western journals, there is a deviation from the essence of lean production and flow management, which aim at overall optimization by focusing on the flow of the entire value chain as well as material and information flow, and empirical studies based on the actual state of material and information flow have not been sufficiently conducted. To proceed with the overall optimization of the material and information flow in the supply and value chain—with progress in globalization and digitalization as seen in recent Japanese manufacturing companies—it is necessary to return to basics to grasp the “actual state of the flow” by focusing on the entire material and information flow and to conduct empirical studies on factors contributing to these flows.

In closed innovation (CI), each firm does R&D on its own; however, on the other hand, in open innovation (OI), companies use knowledge from external sources when necessary or let other firms use their proprietary technologies. Chesbrough (2003) pointed out the effectiveness of OI. OI is accompanied by (1) outsourcing dilemma that prevents a firm from getting a competitive advantage when rival firms can also gain the knowledge from same external sources, (2) integrator's dilemma, which occur when firms sell parts to assemblers that produce and sell the same product, thus becoming formidable rivals, and (3) modularity trap, whereby when it is necessary to redesign the total product structure due to radical product innovations, the firm which selected open modular architecture and OI cannot respond because knowledge has dispersed among firms. OI is not necessarily the most efficient choice when these dilemmas or traps exist.

Much research has been conducted on the role of the middle manager; however, most of the studies in research on this topic have focused on the middle manager's managerial work. However, upon surveying 2,183 managers at Japanese firms, we found that 87% of managers were actually engaged in nonmanagerial work. Furthermore, in extreme cases where middle managers responded that there was either not enough or too much non-managerial work, team performance was poor, while in cases where middle managers did an appropriate amount of nonmanagerial work, team performance was good.

Engagement as a concept is gaining attention in research and management practices. However, there are several types of engagement depending on whether the focus is on work and jobs or companies and organizations. In this paper, we demonstrate the following three points based on comparative analysis of the concepts of work engagement and employee engagement: (a) Both terms are used with the same frequency in academic journals in the field of management, but non-academic sources consistently use “employee engagement,” while medical and nursing articles use “work engagement.” (b) “Work engagement” may be used in this way because the term originated in research of burnout among nurses working in hospitals. (c) While much research does not adequately differentiate the two concepts, they should be treated as distinct concepts due to their distinct origins and the content they measure.

Studies of the value stream mapping (VSM) in Western journals report that leveraging VSM as a lean tool results in performance improvements. However, in these articles, VSM is functioning as a tool for partial optimization, attempting to identify and resolve bottlenecks in individual functions and divisions, primarily in production activities. For that reason, the greater the degree to which VSM underpins success, the more it deviates from the original essence of lean production and flow management, promoting overall optimization by focusing on the flows across the value chain, and potentially leading to poorer performance in the overall value flows up to the customer.

It has been reported that the use of key phrases that all staff share a common understanding of is effective for integration inside an organization. At the Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital, however, integration failed due to the long-standing use of the terms “for the patient” and “patient first.” The staff had assigned different meanings depending on their profession to these terms based on which they had built successful track records for their profession. That experience acted as an inertia preventing changes in attitudes and behaviors and ended up accelerating individually optimal activities for each profession. It is not merely a matter of staff across units simply using the same key phrases; it is important to reduce the ambiguity of the key phrases through behavior.

This paper identifies the national factors related to the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths in each country using the CAGE framework in the international business field. Multiple regression analyses are conducted at multiple time points, with the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 in each country as the dependent variables and cultural factors, administrative and political factors, geographic factors, and economic factors of each country as the independent variables. The analyses reveal the following four points: (1) The cultural, geographical, and economic factors are not significantly associated with the number of COVID-19 infections or deaths. (2) The Administrative and political factors (corruption, government information policy) are negatively associated with the number of COVID-19 infections. (3) None of the factors are associated with the number of COVID-19 deaths. (4) The significance of the correlation between independent and dependent variables changes with time.

This paper intends to understand the overseas business expansion of a Japanese SME that is facilitated by strategic management of technical interns (TIs), a type of foreign migrant labor in Japan. We challenge the current prejudices and narrow view on the role of TIs by introducing a unique case wherein a rural SME utilized TIs as strategic human resources. Furthermore, we highlighted the positive influence of TIs on the gradual insiderization in foreign markets and development of new business opportunities.

Creating new products by incorporating new and original ideas derived from learning the internal mechanisms and structures of machines and other objects at hand through the process of repairing or tinkering with them is fundamental to the innovation, which is a staple of human existence. Recently, however, increasing product complexity, technical constraints, and regulations have gradually narrowed the scope of the user's ability to tinker. This aspect has given momentum to the movement to explicitly reclaim the Right to Repair and the Right to Tinker. This paper thus outlines the process that led to recognition of the importance of these rights.

The concept of ambidexterity and particularly the concept of exploitation are ambiguous. March (1991), a study that became the theoretical basis for several research studies, asserted that exploitation has a trade-off relationship with exploration including innovation, and on the basis of this aspect, Levinthal and March (1993) proposed the myopia of learning. Nevertheless, Levinthal later modeled exploitation that can be called as innovation. Some argued that exploration and exploitation are bipolar on one axis, and some argued that they are two orthogonal axes. In this study, we proposed using Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” instead of “exploitation.” This bricolage is a concept of making do with the tools and materials at hand (performing innovation), and bricolage and exploration are used together with ambidexterity being the normal form. We examine this aspect by using Japan’s response to the current Coronavirus disease pandemic as an example.

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.

Following the example of the United States, Japanese companies have been appointing more independent outside directors in recent years. Independent outside directors are regarded as playing a key role in determining executive compensation and other managerial oversight functions. Prior research mostly supports this idea with respect to U.S. corporations. However, some studies are more skeptical. Therefore, in response to a prior study on U.S. corporations by Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2009), this paper takes a sample of 322 Japanese non-financial corporations in the TOPIX 500 index that met certain criteria and analyzes the effect that having more independent directors has had on executive compensation. However, unlike in prior studies, we did not observe a statistically significant effect. In fact, we saw that executive compensation levels were affected more by the structure of executive remuneration that is determined across a company as a whole than by the composition of its board of directors.

Japanese whisky now ranks as one of the five major whiskies in the world, but how did it come about? Suntory, which has won several prizes in international competitions since the beginning of the 21st century, was making many types of component whisky in the 1980s, when it was trying to deal with diversifying consumer needs and suffered from declining whisky sales. Ironically, these various malts led to the production of many high-quality blended whiskies, which are now winning prizes in international competitions.

When a market grows and matures so that its product becomes commoditized, we can usually expect product prices to decline due to price competition. However, in the digital camera market, although prices started to decline after they first went on sale, camera prices then began to rise. This was not because mass consumers shifted from the low-priced segment to the high-priced segment. Prices went up across all segments of the market. (A) In the low-priced segment, companies making low-priced products exited the market, and the remaining companies raised their prices by focusing on higher-quality products. (B) In the higher-priced segment, the number of major makers started declining, and prices steadily rose because products priced close to the highest-class products were released into the market. (C) In the mid-priced segment, two types of companies entered the market: companies in the low-priced segment that had developed higher-quality products and companies in the high-priced segment that added mid-priced products as alternatives.