In recent years, there have been many efforts in technology development, supply chain management, and digital transformation aimed at total optimization. This paper analyzes the context in which the terms total optimization and partial optimization have been used in Japanese companies, based on the frequency of their mentions and their trends in newspaper articles. The issue of total optimization has been covered by newspapers since the late 1980s and has been discussed for many years along with its solutions such as supply chain management (SCM), business process reengineering (BPR), and information and communication technology (ICT). The fact that the total optimization issue has continued to attract attention suggests that formal organization has not yet been established. While there has been a focus on promoting communication such as cross functional collaboration and integration, and the introduction and utilization of information technology, there has not yet been enough focus on what optimization is for in the first place, and the establishment requirements for formal organization still have not been sufficiently fulfilled.

In the early 20th century, when Spanish flu and tuberculosis were prevalent, laborers in the Japanese textile industry worked long hours in poor conditions, and the risk of contracting an infectious disease was high. In such a situation, forward-thinking companies set up hospitals as a voluntary measure for dealing with infectious disease, provided free medical care and assistance payments in the event of illness, improved company dormitories, and introduced other measures for safeguarding workers’ welfare such as upgrading factories and offering educational programs. These programs influenced other companies and resulted in improvements in the working conditions at a number of firms, indicating that these countermeasures against infectious diseases were economically rational. This in turn implies that it is economically rational to upgrade sanitation and workers’ welfare in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The trend toward modularization, which has been evident in electronic products since the 1990s, is usually seen as a form of architectural innovation. However, the relationship between technology and the customer/market has been characterized by disruptive innovation wherein 1) the level of technology and the value of the product have been downgraded, and consequently, 2) conventional legitimacy has become invalid. Accordingly, although the current leading Japanese companies have not been negligent in their innovation, they have lost their share of the market to new products born from modularization, which had initially been thought of like toys.

The concept of a hacker originated in the 1970s, and began to gradually take shape in the 1980s. It began to be discussed actively in various contexts, particularly in relation with the rise of open-source operating systems such as GNU and Linux in the 1990s until the early 2000s. Subsequently, as the times changed, the qualities that were demanded of reputable programmers changed in a major way. Originally, the programmers' capabilities in terms of writing code were most important, while their sociability was less emphasized. However, as computers became more common among the general public, and their social impact increased, hackers were required to be more socially amenable in various ways. Therefore, a large number of open-source projects introduced codes of conduct.

This paper investigated how design thinking is researched in management studies. A review of articles published in major business management journals found commonalities in that (a) while design thinking consists of several studies and includes various elements, (b) the most recent empirical research has in common that based on Brown (2009) and Martin (2009), along with practices and tools, the themes of user centeredness and experimentation are discussed.

Video games require the integration of elements such as world building, scenario, graphics, and music (Ikuine, 2000). In a video game product development project, the personnel who design and coordinate each element need to have an overall understanding of the product components. In the Japanese video game industry of 20 or more years, new employees were able to participate in the design and coordination of each element of the product as soon as they joined the company and acquired an overall understanding of product components. However, due to the recent increase in the size of development projects, the tasks assigned to new employees have become more segmentalized and modular, resulting in it becoming difficult for them to acquire an overall understanding of product components. Cyber Connect2, a Japanese video game development company, is trying to solve this problem by launching small experimental video game development projects and assigning young employees to work on them.

Rosenkopf and Nerkar (2001) examined the relationship between patents with a boundary-spanning exploration of organizations and technological domains and their impact on subsequent technological evolution, using patent data for optical disks as the technological domain. However, the results of their analysis will be affected by the size of the technological domain itself. Therefore, this study analyzes and compares (a) vector control technology for electric motors and (b) the larger technology domain that includes (a). The results indicate that in the case of (a), vector control technology, even when a boundary-spanning exploration is conducted, there is some outside impact, but no domain impact. By comparison, in the larger technology area (b), there was some domain impact, but less outside impact. In other words, the hypotheses were partially supported for vector control technology in electric motors; however, the wider the technological domain, the stronger the domain impact and the weaker the outside impact tended to be, and the impact is dependent on the granularity with which the technology field is defined.

Previous research has demonstrated that different ways of interpreting the same stimulus can result in significantly different behaviors of and outcomes for the interpreters. This paper analyzes how employees interpret their workplaces from the perspective of the concept of “ambidexterity,” which is a part of the organizational learning theory. An analysis of the questionnaire survey data collected from 1,650 white-collar full-time employees in the Tokyo metropolitan region of Japan indicated that (a) there was a significant positive correlation between exploitation and exploration; (b) contrary to previous perceptions, no trade-off relationship was observed between the two, and (c) the “ambidexterity” group—which exhibited high levels of exploitation and exploration—tended to interpret the office as a place for “communication,” while the “neither” group—which exhibited a low levels of both these variables—tended to view the office as a place for “concentration.”

This study examines the definition of shared leadership and how to measure it. Research so far defines shared leadership as possessing some basic common characteristics. However, the aggregation approach and the social network approach, which have different characteristics, coexist in terms of measurement methods. The former combines various existing leadership concepts and emphasizes the “leadership” part. The latter looks at how leadership is being shared; thus, the emphasis is on the “shared” part.

The results of prior research on the impact of top management team (TMT) diversity on corporate performance have been varied and inconsistent. In this study, the operational definitions of TMT and diversity were checked in academic papers published between 2005 and 2020 on TMT diversity. The results confirmed three patterns for the operational definition of TMT: (a) extracted by title rank, (b) selected by CEO or equivalent top manager, and (c) executives announced in the company's public information/database. As for diversity, in addition to the studies that use conventional indices that express the various attributes of executives, it was confirmed that there exist many studies that consider diversity from the aspects of separation and disparity. Such “diversity” in the operational definition is considered the cause of the lack of consistency between TMT diversity and corporate performance.

In recent years, we have been observing a rise in cases of continuous development projects. However, if we try to improve development productivity using the data and development knowhow that we have accumulated, it then becomes difficult to use this to expand product functions. In fact, a “development productivity dilemma” actually exists, in which it is difficult for each product to have both improved development productivity and expanded product functions. In the case discussed in this paper, however, the company sacrifices development productivity to expand the product functions of a particular product and then applies this to streamlining and simplifying subsequent products. In other words, the development productivity dilemma was overcome by managing the flow of a series of new products.

The survey of Chinese employees working for Japanese companies and graduating from universities in China revealed that factors such as intercultural gap, Japanese ability, and workplace human relations have limited correlation with the 4-faceted motivation scores. The existence of career perspectives did however appear to relate to motivation scores including learning. The reason for low motivation scores of Chinese employees derived from the fact that they had limited opportunities for participating in job fairs during their job search, or communicating with senior employees. Due to the absence of a career perspective, employees were dissatisfied with their day-to-day work after joining the companies.

Interdepartmental collaboration is considered to be critical to innovation and efficiency. This paper differentiated industrial design (ID) and engineering design (ED), which differ in their nature and are handled by different departments, and reviews in the literature on the impact that interdepartmental collaboration among industrial designers and other areas involved in product development has on innovation and efficiency. We found that: (1) regarding innovation, interdepartmental collaboration has a positive effect on design innovation, and CE type interdepartmental collaboration has a positive effect on technology innovation. (2) Regarding efficiency, we found that the effect on the efficiency of the product development process was not consistent, and production efficiency was not looked into in prior research.

COVID-19 has accelerated the spread of telecommuting in Japan. In past studies regarding telecommuting, it was proved to be the result of i-deals, so it was discussed in the context of location flexibility i-deals (LFi-deals). The spread of COVID-19, however, has given rise to semi-compulsory telecommuting. Therefore, this study takes three groups: Group A, which continues to work at the office as before; Group B, which has started to telecommute (inexperienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is regarded as semi-compulsory; and Group C, which has experience with telecommuting (experienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is the result of making LFi-deals; and investigates the relationship that telecommuting has with the degree of self-determination (DSD) and productivity. Our analysis found that between Group B and Group C, which were both telecommuting, both DSD and productivity were significantly higher for Group C which has LFi-deals compared with Group B, for which telecommuting is semi-compulsory. However, DSD and productivity were higher for Group B than for Group A, so it is possible that starting to telecommute leads to more LFi-deals, a greater DSD, and higher productivity.

The workcation, wherein people combine work with vacation, is a concept that originated in the United States and Europe with the spread of information and communications technology (ICT). Although it is considered a workstyle for independent people as epitomized by freelancers and the like, in Japan, the term has come to convey something different from its original meaning, taking a unique direction in which some types of training programs are referred to as workcation. How did this change come about? This study, based on surveys of three regions, examines the origin and development of satellite office workcation and learning workcation to ascertain the following. (1) In Japan, people with workcation are assumed to be employees. (2) Therefore, the workcation is heavily influenced by local governments' intentions (wanting to associate with exchange populations) and companies' intentions (it is difficult to dispatch employees to outlying areas without a work-related purpose). (3) Therefore, the workcation has evolved into something that aims to enhance creativity, learning, and introspection through close ties with communities.

In the fast-growing Chinese heavy commercial vehicle market, it has been claimed that the rule is “manufacturers cannot survive unless they exceed an annual production scale of 10,000 units.” However, Japanese automakers GAC Hino Motors Company (GHMC) and Qingling Motors have been producing a profit in the Chinese market even though their production scale is less than 10,000 units. This has been due to the adaptation of a Japanese production system that can maintain a constant productivity standard even when dealing with small-scale production. However, the success of this Japanese production system has been due to the development of a method of fostering multiskilled workers in accordance with the actual circumstances in China.

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.