Offshore production of Japanese companies has been steadily developed. This series discuss about the impact of offshore production on domestic manufacturing, relationship between domestic mother factories and offshore factories, developing global production network, and long and complex global supply chain based on empirical data. The first of the series discuss about the development of offshore production and its impact on domestic manufacturing. We explain that both offshore production and export had increased in the 2000s. Offshore production and export have an complementary relationship, not substitutive.

Lilien, Morrison, Searls, Sonnack, and von Hippel (2002) performed quantitative analysis on the new product development performance of 3M projects and concluded lead user idea-generation processes leads better results than non lead user idea-generation processes for new product development, which many following researchers have cited. However, no following researches have seem to review this study thoroughly. Thus, this paper reviews Lilien et al. (2002) and reveals that (a) Lilien et al (2002) is not reliable enough since it uses fairly subjective and personal performance indicator for quantitative analysis and (b) lead user idea-generation processes which Lilien et al. (2002) recoginizes as creative and effective is just one of non-lead user idea-generations.