Eisenman (2013) argues that the importance of design innovation increases in the early and late stages of an industry and is lowest in the middle stage. In response, this study empirically examines her proposition through an examination of mobile phones during the feature phone era (1999–2008) when various types of designs were being generated using design patent data. We analyze the number of mobile phone design patents registered before the current advent of smart phones as well as examining the yearly averages of forward citations (the number of times a particular design patent is cited in later design patents) and backward citations (the number of times a particular design patent cites previous design patents). Further, to shed light on interactions with an accumulation of design-related technology, the study also analyzes the number of design-related patent applications per year. Results reveal that while there was an increase in the number of design patents registered in the late stage of the industry, especially between the years of 2007–2008, the average number of forward citations drops below the average number of backward citations from 2003 onward. In other words, although at the late stages of the industry many design innovations emerged, most of these were incremental changes that followed past designs. In contrast, design-related patent applications reached a peak in 2004 and fell thereafter. It is hypothesized that this trend was influenced by the growing number of design-related patents that facilitated the easy generation of new variations in design. These results show the dilemma: Although design innovations continue to be generated over time by accumulating design-related technology, creating genuinely impactful design innovation becomes more difficult as time progresses. The study therefore demonstrates the difficulty of realizing Eisenman (2013)’s theoretical proposition.

Retail prices must be kept low in order to increase the diffusion of home video game hardware. In the 1980s and 1990s, when high-performance semiconductor prices were high, the performance of the hardware was limited. Owing to hardware restrictions, Japanese video game hardware developers had to improve their ability to increase the entertainment offered by their hardware. By the 2000s, home video game hardware that was the same spec as cutting-edge PC hardware came onto the market. As a result, consumers in the European and North American markets began to demand home video game software that could take advantage of high-performance hardware. This is when European and North American home video game developers began to flourish, as their experience with video game development on the PC meant that they had the ability to develop games that took advantage of high-level hardware functionality. At the same time, Japanese home video game developers were struggling in the global market, including North America, because the development organization and capabilities that they had built before 2000 acted as core rigidity.

There are fundamental differences between research into WOM (word-of-mouth), in which communication occurs face-to-face, and one into eWOM (electric word-of-mouth), which occurs over the Internet between strangers. In specifically looking at motivational factors, this study reveals significant differences in that while traditional WOM studies mainly discuss recipient motives, eWOM studies (a) mainly discuss sender motives and (b) permit the inclusion of economic motives.

In recent years, global demand for Japanese whisky has been growing. Venture Whisky, a Japanese venture launched in 2004, is a born-global company exporting whiskies since 2006. It was able to win born-global status through resource-based venturing. Although the founder did not inherit assets or control of his family business, he recovered 400 casks of whisky that had once passed into other hands and was able to establish his business with these 400 casks as its basis. It was this “resource-based venturing” that proved to be a critical factor in the company’s success. That is to say, businesses that start with some sort of resource basis have a higher success potential than those starting from scratch, and sticking with succession of the existing business would have hardly led to success. The very key to this success is in resource-based venturing.

Papers on operations management in major journals have studied (1) relationships between the level of alignment in business and manufacturing strategies, practice realization, and performance; (2) the role of plants in global production networks; and (3) the reconciling of business and manufacturing strategies by operational executives. However, while these studies have positioned the role of plants as a strategic weapon in firms, their perspective is that the role of plants is imparted by headquarters or business units. Actually, the phenomenon which Japanese domestic plants have continued to work on various issues in an advanced manner from a global view went beyond this scope. There is a need for exploratory research from the perspective of plants as to the relationship between the role of plants and the strategic behavior of factory managers in continuing to grow while trying to survive in challenging environments and organizational capabilities built in plants.

An organization is said to be in an activated state if “(1) the members have a common purpose and (2) they are actively willing to contribute action to accomplish this common purpose” (Takahashi, 1992). Problem solvers that fulfill requirements (1) and (2) play an active role in an activated state. At Company A, which is discussed in this paper and was in a crisis with its performance, employees demonstrated initiative to activate the organization by pursuing Product Identity rather than corporate identity with regard to (1) above. Moreover, this activation started to expand to other companies because of its nature as Product Identity.

In case of products under continuous development, such as mobile games, (a) the development workload for bug fixing is accompanied by (b) the development workload of new content, which exhausts development teams. This paper examined a case of a company where (a) some developers suffered exhaustion while responding to bugs pointed out by users. However, many of the bugs were related to specific events and items. Thus, the company chose not to include the bug fixes in quick updates as long as they were not emergencies related to the game system. In addition, (b) initially PvE (Player versus Environment) content comprised 70% of the new content, whereas PvP (Player versus Player) content comprised 30%. However, the consumption of PvE content was faster than originally estimated, resulting in exhaustion of the development team. By contrast, PvP content was generated primarily by users, and additions to content were not frequent, although considerable time was needed to validate the content. For validation, simulations of portions of user fights were conducted, which indicated reduction of time by approximately 35%; in addition, the ratios of PvE and PvP content were changed to 40% and 60%, respectively. Through (a) and (b), the feeling of exhaustion experienced by the development teams was ameliorated, and by increasing the proportion of PvP, which had a high social component, the company succeeded in acquiring new users and monetizing existing paid users.

Even when customers are satisfied, they could be having experiences not intended by the company. By comparing dyad relationships between headquarters and stores of a Japanese auto dealer company, this paper examines how decision authority on touchpoints should be distributed to create a superior customer experience. Overall, decision authority was distributed towards stores; however, two stores known for high-quality customer experiences had headquarters exercise decision authority on brand promotion touchpoints. Further, these two stores adapted interpersonal touchpoints to brand promotion touchpoints created by headquarters. In short, from a brand perspective, it is desirable to differentiate decision authority while achieving consistency between touchpoints.

The notion that you are free to do what you want with your property is extremely childish and immature, regardless of whether the property in question is an animal, a physical object, or a company. An owner has responsibilities, and even owner-managers are not free to do whatever they want with their companies. Doing so would be treating the company like one’s personal property and such acts are punishable by law. In conclusion, it is crucial to understand that owners have responsibilities as long as they call themselves owners.

Since the 1990s, research has been done on lean production systems with progressive development of a scale for measuring characteristic leanness in efficient production organizations. For example, Shah and Ward (2003, 2007) originated from the HPM and IMSS surveys become as the de facto standard. However, the explanations of these studies were not necessarily convincing. In contrast, in the IMVP survey, site visits were made to automakers’ development and production genba or sites in each country surveyed, in addition to the use of questionnaires. However, in actuality, a comparison of multiple Japanese automakers showed differences in methods and means for achieving just-in-time production in organizations, even at the genba that would be believed to score high on a leanness scale, such as JIT production. It is difficult to detect and measure these differences through large-scale cross-industry questionnaire surveys alone, and there is a possibility that this difficulty manifests in the weak explanatory power of the lean studies. Approaches to explaining differences in performance using “leanness scale” are based on a lean hypothesis where there is a best practice lean situation transcending nations and industries, yet its low explanatory power creates suspicion with regard to the validity of this hypothesis.

Japan has since ancient times had a custom called omiai (loosely translated as “matchmaking” when searching for a marriage partner). The examples of the matching of large firms and start-ups at the Innovation Leaders Summit in Japan discussed in this paper can truly be called “omiai.” Unlike Western-style matching, in this summit, participating firms and managers alike have little experience with alliances, and matchmakers have no strong commitment, as noted by Holzmann, Sailer, and Katzy (2014). Instead, just as with omiai, matchmakers exchange profiles of large firms and start-ups new to alliances and simply create a place for them to meet and make matches.

In the field of management research, the grounded theory approach (GTA) pioneered by Glaser and Strauss (1967) is frequently cited to assert methodological validity in qualitative theory-building studies, in contrast with quantitative research that uses majority hypothesis validation. Glaser and Strauss eventually came to disagree with each other, and GTA branched into three perspectives. Of these, Strauss and Corbin (1990), which defines coding and other analytical processes in detail, is cited most frequently although the studies that cite it do not necessarily reflect its characteristics. It is, therefore, clear that the differences in these three perspectives are not connected with differences in research methodologies.

The open innovation proposed by Chesbrough (2003a) had a heavy impact on practical business, and not just academia. However, the definition of open innovation is broad and ambiguous, with Chesbrough himself not providing a clear, specific example of open innovation practice (OIP). Thus, practitioners interpret it in many ways. Accordingly, to accurately measure the impact of open innovation, OIP must be classified into several types. This paper proposes two methods for classification. The first is whether the OIP of Chesbrough and that of the practitioner are aligned. From this perspective, OIP can be categorized in three ways: (a) what both Chesbrough and the practitioner call OIP; (b) what Chesbrough calls OIP, but not the practitioner; and (c) what a practitioner calls OIP but not Chesbrough. (a) can be clearly evaluated as the impact of open innovation, while more attention is required when interpreting (b) and (c). Second is the differentiation of whether activities that are currently implemented as OIP were started (i) before or (ii) after Chesbrough (2003a). (ii) can be seen as the impact of open innovation, though (i) is nothing more than changing the name of something that was previously just a “practice” into “OIP.” If (i) is included in the impact of open innovation, there is a risk of exaggerating the assessment of open innovation.

In the case of sales and marketing organization reform discussed in this paper, organizational routines with excellent results were created. Despite visibility and standardization in a form usable for other organizations, the routines were not transferred between sales offices due to the rules of the sales organization, where “autonomy is maintained if an organization achieves KPIs.” In other words, in organizations where each sales office achieves KPIs and has good performance, the high level of autonomy in each office is preserved, and the offices (a) may make their own improvements to organizational routines and (b) will not have the organizational routines of other organizations forced on them. In organizations with good performance, it was observed that organizational routines (a) evolve uniquely in each sales office and (b) undergo an adaptive radiation where they are not rolled out to other sales offices.

Allen and Gerstberger (1973) reported that non-territorial offices improve privacy. In actuality, however, a view of the office layout after an experiment showed that the office used in the experiment was not just simply made into a non-territorial office, but had various zoning done such that zones could be selected according to circumstance. With that idea in mind, this study analyzes the impact of non-territorial offices on privacy as well as the effect of various zoning, based on data of 6,592 individuals obtained through internet surveys. Results of the analysis showed that 1) non-territorial offices themselves do not have a major impact on privacy (they neither improve nor worsen privacy); 2) rather, various zoning is what improves privacy; and 3) further, of note is that privacy dramatically worsens in non-territorial offices without any various zoning, and vastly improves where various zoning has been thoroughly implemented. These results give one solution for the disputes over non-territorial offices and privacy, and provide suggestions for a new type of office (activity-based working, or an activity-based office).

Many small and medium-sized enterprises' managers hesitate to launch new businesses for the diversification or business change. In the case of new business launching by Yamato Industrial and Yamaguchi Kasei, decline of their existing businesses was a threat, and simultaneously, it has become an opportunity for launching new business, just as the saying “tough times bring opportunity.” In addition, the experience of launching a second business, rather than experience at startup, will motivate managers to launch businesses continuously.

In a review of the existing literature dealing with organizational change, Weick and Quinn (1999) asserted that the contrasting organizational changes of episodic change and continuous change reflect the perspective of the observer. That is, an organizational change can be explained and described as being an episodic change or a continuous change; however, no specific examples were given. The example of change in the Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital discussed in this paper is explained by a leader as being an episodic change, but the same situation is described by a staff member, who is a follower, as being a continuous change.

In a cross-sectional survey of seven companies, Takahashi (1996b) discovered a U-shaped curve, with (a) newly hired employees and long-time employees tending to have a high perspective index, and with (b) those with 5–10 years of service tending to be at the bottom of the index. This paper is an examination of Company X, using 12 years of exhaustive survey data. We found that (a) for data in all years, the trend was represented by a similar U-shaped curve, with recent hires and long-time employees being high on the perspective index, and with (b) those at the bottom of the perspective index having shifted over time. This points to the existence of a generation that holds a relatively low perspective index regardless of their number of years of service with the company. This phenomenon seems to develop as the number of years of service increases.

The time pressure felt by consumers in a limited time situation has long been of interest. However, there have been no discussions in the existing literature regarding time pressure in long-term time constraints, which run from a few days to a few weeks for limited time edition products. In this research, a web survey was conducted on how the perceived quality of limited edition products with time constraints changed with the strength of time constraints in limited edition products. Results showed that limited edition products with a time constraint of 1 week were assessed to be of higher quality than those that had a time constraint of 1 month, with consumers feeling stronger time pressure.

Watts and Dodds (2007) showed that in a simulation, supporters of opinion leaders have larger influence than opinion leaders themselves. In this paper, a case analysis was done of an anonymous housewife who created a network and acquired supporters on a social network and then started an apparel brand. The analysis revealed that influence strengthens by having both (a) a network centered around an opinion leader and (b) a complete network with six hardcore fans acting as supporters.