The word “Galapagos” has garnered attention in Japan as an explanation for the loss of global competitiveness by the Japanese economy and Japanese companies, even while the Japanese companies are competitive domestically. The term has particularly been used with mobile phones in Japan, which are known as “Galapagos ke-tai.” An analysis of newspaper articles showed that discussions on Galapagos mobile phones were primarily about technology, technology standards, and features. However, smartphones that looked like Galapagos ke-tai came to be called “Garaho” later, and the term Galapagos then took on the meaning of appearance.

In existing research on new product development, it has been believed that the product development by companies needs to reflect the changes in customer needs. Particularly, for products in which continual development is a characteristic, customer needs must be addressed at multiple points in time. However, by comparing the cases of two companies from the online game industry, we found that long-term performance of a company which responded flexibly suffered a drop, with the ratio of new users dropping and the user attrition rate increasing. Therefore, we believed that too much attention was paid to the requests of lead users.

Prior research on customized component transactions asserts that from a manufacturer’s perspective, customization costs can be reduced by creating collaborative relationships. However, there are few researches on the supplier’s perspective. In this paper, a survey of Japanese suppliers revealed that (a) supplier performance improves when there are more proposals both from and to customers, and that (b) supplier performance deteriorates when proposals only come from the customer. In other words, in case of the top-down relationship in (b), supplier performance deteriorates, but in the bidirectional relationship in (a), supplier performance improves.

A call center is a division that specializes in dealing with customers. Early studies on call centers regarded them as strategically important areas that, despite some negative aspects, were acknowledged to possess a certain level of expertise and to have a high degree of autonomy as interfaces for customers. However, this view gradually changed, with call centers coming to be seen as workplaces typified by harsh working conditions and isolated from the other divisions of the company. Therefore, research in recent years has entirely focused on these negative aspects, while ignoring the positive aspects.

When a company acquires new knowledge, it expects to create new business by fusing the new knowledge with existing knowledge. At least that is how things appear superficially. However, Fujitsu’s new business development discussed in this paper was not related to any new knowledge but sprung up because of other reasons. Because the company had invested a lot of resources to acquire new knowledge, it was impossible to recover the management resources that it had invested, which then became sunk costs, unless the company did something. We call such a situation “sunk cost pressure.” In the case examined in this paper, this sunk cost pressure induced the combining of disparate knowledge in the company’s possession, thus creating new business.

The development and diffusion of compliance activities in Japanese companies from around 2000 can be thought of as a typical example of the institutional isomorphism discussed by DiMaggio and Powell (1983), that is, isomorphism mechanisms that were at work irrespective of performance (Aizawa, 2018a). Snow Brand Milk Products had a corporate scandal in 2000, and the compliance activities it began soon after comprised institutional isomorphism. In actuality, at that time there was no extraordinary worsening of performance, though directly after the scandal in 2002, the company was beset by a worsening of performance that put the company in danger, and it waged its survival on a wide-ranging rethinking of the details of its compliance activities to make them more unique. In addition, it spun off core businesses and transferred some of its shares in order to win back trust. Companies that have confronted management crises and have survived work toward restoring trust using similar methods. In other words, even when the same company doesn’t have selection pressures, institutional isomorphism may arise, and when there are selection pressures, competitive isomorphism may arise.

This study analyzes the relationship between work engagement (WE) and job performance based on data from 3,296 individuals obtained in an internet survey. First, the analysis was conducted with WE as an explanatory variable, as well as with job performance, which was measured as the difference in personal and workmate evaluations, as an objective variable, and yet no clear relationship was found. Job performance was then used as an explanatory variable and WE as an objective variable, and that analysis discovered a clear inverse U relationship between the two. In other words, WE is low when job performance is low or high, and high when job performance is in the middle range. Also, when an analysis was done with the prediction that sum of, rather than differences in, personal and workmate assessments will have a strong relationship with WE, it was found that there was a clear, positive linear relationship between the two. In other words, the more a person highly evaluates not only oneself but also one’s workmates, the higher the WE. Existing studies tend to believe that WE heightens job performance, yet this study indicates that the converse is perhaps true in this cause and effect relationship. It also suggests that WE increases as one builds healthy relationships with workmates, evaluates them highly, and works hard and competes in a friendly manner with them.

It is said that when an organization embarks on a new activity, the entire organization needs to be on board with the organizational purpose of that activity. However, in the case of Hospital X, which implemented kaizen, even though the purposes of kaizen differed across workers, the usefulness of these new activities was communicated as being shared purposes (a) among workers in the same division where superiors and subordinates work closely together and (b) among workers performing the same jobs but in different divisions. Thus, the new activities were adopted by the entire organization without having a common organizational purpose.

Novel ideas tend to be resisted within existing organizations. Mobilizing resources requires that legitimacy be secured in some form. In the case of the development of JR Central's 300-series Shinkansen, Japan National Railway, which had existed to date, was broken up and privatized, and JR Central, which generated most of its revenue from the Shinkansen, was established, limiting players and allowing the company to gain the approval of most internal organizations. In other words, the company was able to acquire legitimacy by increasing the ratio of supporters rather than the absolute number of supporters.

It has been explained in the past that multinational firms gain competitive advantage by creating a structure for the international division of labor through allocating certain activities in their value chains to advantageous locations. Actually, however, a firm's subsidiaries are exposed to business environments that differ from those of their home country; hence, an international division of labor may have resulted from an emergent strategy. The Ikegami Mold Engineering Group has production sites in Japan, Mexico, and China that manufacture and sell molds. The Mexico site differs from the others in that it repairs and overhauls molds. This business was not planned in advance but was rather built from an emergent strategy because of the business environment in Mexico: the industrial infrastructure is not suited to the manufacture of molds, the Mexican market exhibited demand for the repair and overhaul of molds, and Ikegami had built up the technological capabilities to respond to that need. Thus, a new business was born to repair and overhaul molds.

What can be done to improve future parameters? Company X is a large firm with 1,300 full-time employees and 35 branches throughout Japan. Data collected from questionnaires showed that as the president of the company made site visits to the company’s branches, which created opportunities for dialog with employees, these efforts led to greater expectations for the future and improved those branches’ future parameters vis-à-vis branches that were not visited. This study found that this impact was even greater as employees’ attendance at social gatherings involving employees following these conversations was more than 80%. However, this impact disappeared when the company got a new president and this practice was discontinued. In other words, future parameters are not constants; hence, maintaining them requires constant attention.

From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, major institutional reform was undertaken in Japan to promote university–industry collaboration. The term “university–industry collaboration” appeared frequently in the media and became a fad. However, this did not last long, and it peaked in 2003. University–industry collaboration entered the spotlight again after 2010, when “open innovation” (Chesbrough, 2003) became popular in Japan. At that time, a new type of university–industry collaboration emerged. University–industry collaboration in Japan has traditionally taken the form of “small-scale, short-term, individual” contracts. In contrast, this new type of collaboration features “large-scale, long-term, comprehensive” contracts.

There is a general preconception that existing technologies are replaced by new ones. Christensen (1997) believed that integrated steelmaking technologies would be replaced by minimills in the steel industry. In addition, it was believed that traditional blast furnace technology in this industry would be replaced by FINEX technology. Whether it be the new technology of minimills or that of FINEX, either are vastly superior in cost when compared with existing technologies. In actuality, however, these new technologies have only replaced some existing technologies and even today are merely complementary to existing technologies. Both of these new technologies have issues with quality, and companies have not yet decided to discard existing technologies to replace them with the new ones.

This study conducted a questionnaire survey (N = 2938) examining the relationship between office behavior and creativity. The analysis showed a positive correlation between creativity and three behavioral characteristics (collaboration, flexibility, and demonstration) in an office environment. However, these correlations vary depending on individuals’ personalities. In particular, those with creative personalities cannot augment their creativity if the office does not possess extraordinarily high levels of the three behavioral characteristics as creativity cannot be enhanced very much in an office with only a medium level of these characteristics. At the same time, those who do not have a creative personality can increase their creativity even when they are in an office with a medium level of the three behavioral characteristics. However, turning an office into a place with extraordinarily high levels of these behavioral characteristics does not necessarily enhance creativity. In other words, office policies that consider creative personalities are required.

Japanese firms' compliance activities have developed and become the norm to a certain extent. However, when we surveyed seven companies in various industries, including two firms that have experienced scandals, through interviews and public documents, we found that these seven firms' compliance systems were surprisingly similar. This is because the institutionalization of compliance activities among Japanese firms has advanced under the influence of the Japan Business Federation and the Japanese government, and in fact, the mechanism of Dimaggio and Powell's institutional isomorphism is at work. We believe that this is because the isomorphism in compliance activities that has developed independently of performance or of the ability to prevent scandals.

Existing research often cites continuity as a characteristic of organizational identity. In today’s world of dramatically changing business environments, however, how are organizations to maintain continuity? This paper uses text mining to analyze 14 years of annual reports, from 2002 to 2014, of FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation to understand changes in characteristic terms. Results showed that even as the market for FUJIFILM’s primary business, photographic film, shrunk dramatically, the term “film” continued to be used in various contexts, and the meaning of the term updated in response to changes in the company’s business structure. The company’s management used this process to deliberately keep continuity in an effort to maintain organizational identity.

This document analyzes the evolution of policy-related discussions in open source software by using several projects’ policy mailing list archives and focusing on the Debian Project. More specifically, it utilizes approximately 70,000 pieces of mail exchanged since the end of the 1990s, investigating the rise and fall in activity and what sort of topics was discussed. The results of this paper’s inquiry suggest that mail volumes peaked in 2005, that policy discussions were led and mainly contributed to by a relatively small subset of persons who only posted related to policy, and that overall mailing list traffic (not only related to policy) declined after 2006, possibly due to a transfer of discussion to Wikis, chats, and other such platforms.

With cosmetics, one cannot determine at a glance exactly what product a person is using. This paper analyzes the impact of a consumer network on cosmetics, which are goods that are not conspicuous. Comments in word-of-mouth websites for cosmetics is used as a proxy variable for purchasing behavior, and the relationship between a consumer network and purchasing behavior in a social network is analyzed. In cosmetics, which are not conspicuous, this paper has confirmed that consumers exhibit the same purchasing behavior as when they are in a relationship with structural equivalence within a network and not just in relationships with cohesion.

Many motorcycle dealers are family businesses, and they are rather oriented to short-term sales and do not operate only on logic without an emotional stake. Harley-Davidson Japan (HDJ) set up an authorized dealership system made up only of dealers with no capital relationship and did not directly manage dealers. This paper examines the period from 1991 to 2008, when Toshifumi Okui was the CEO of HDJ, during which time HDJ maintained top market share among large motorcycle companies in Japan and was a successful example of distribution system integration for other motorcycle manufacturers. For the dealers to implement HDJ’s intentions, the formal side of HDJ’s distribution system integration focused on the institutionalization of a “no control sales zero policy” and a “multilayer human relationship building policy.” However, critical to these were informal handwritten letters from the top-level management and the “Tokyo Court.”

A strategy that uses the productive performance of a manufacturing site (or genba), noted as a strength of Japan’s manufacturing industry by Fujimoto (2003), might also be called a capability-based cost leadership strategy (CBCL strategy). In the 1990s, this strategy ceased to function due to environment changes, and the international competitiveness of Japan’s manufacturing industry declined. As a means of breaking through those circumstances, Fujimoto emphasized strengthening market performance and choosing a differentiation strategy for appealing to consumers based on high product quality. In the end, however, the performance of Japan’s manufacturing industry is restored after the environment changed to become favorable to a CBCL strategy such as rising labor costs in newly developing countries and a shift to a weaker yen. This suggests that many Japanese manufacturers could not shift to differentiation strategies based on enhanced competitiveness in the market, and CBCL strategies were left in place.