This paper took up the case of Introduction of Early Stage Control (ESC) System, particular to Japanese production management, into the foreign group company (auto parts maker) in Asia with minor investment ratio on Japanese company side. ESC system is an essential tool to assure the high level of QCD of the new products during the process from R&D development to production, which is considered as one source of the competitiveness of Japanese makers. Implementation of ESC is quite difficult for foreign companies, though the Japanese counterparts flexibly handle it. In this paper, we clarified what kind of problems the local company faced with and how they dealt with them to implement ESC properly. The ARC framework was used to analyze the case from the perspective of organizational design. We found out the importance of 1) positioning ESC tasks properly in the organizational structure, 2) making a formal flow of information for decision making on ESC, 3) putting ESC tasks in the formal assessment and payment system, and 4) the Architect-type leadership of top management to optimize the whole process of ESC across the various related functional departments concurrently.

Histories of Japanese companies are usually written by employees of the company and privately published. While some are written by scholars, their names are rarely showed on a page for publication information. On the other hand, histories of American or European companies are ordinarily written by scholars and published by a publisher, though company executives hold the right to read the manuscripts and make comments on them or request modifications by contracts with authors. This paper also shows how a company history is ‘made’ on the case of hundred-year history of Yamaichi Securities.

This technical note reconsiders Thompson (1965) and refinds the importance of his discussion. Thompson’s research object is to explain the relationship between bureaucracy and innovation and also points out what factor of bureaucracy inhibit innovative activities. Nonetheless, his idea does not simply criticize bureaucracy but gives solutions for existing bureaucracy in today’s innovation based competition. Although many studies published post 2000 often have missed this point as these studies refered to Thompson (1965) simply as an convenient definition of innovation, however, we could see that his study have shed light on the future research possibilities of innovation from organizational theory.