COVID─19 has expanded from early 2020 rapidly and has dramatically revealed the negative aspects of accelerated globalization and pursuit of mobility. In the Age of Living with COVID─19, there will be increasing urgency to rebuild society in a decentralized form, to ensure the independence and resilience of regional cities and communities in Japan.

This paper explores the role of family business in regional revitalization by focusing on the relationship between the characteristics of the socioemotional wealth of the family business and entrepreneurship.

In order to create regional revitalization, innovation that creates economic and social value by taking advantage of regional characteristics is necessary. This and other elements of regional strength, such as tradition-based innovation and entrepreneurship, the curbing of excessive competition such as cutthroat competition, and a shift from quantitative growth to qualitative growth, are the antithesis of the various problems of modern society that must be reflected on. The key is the producers’ sense of belonging and attachment to the region: the region and their own survival are perceived as two sides of the same coin.

This paper insists that the leading force behind regional revitalization is a family business that conducts business succession in the region over a long period of time, retains SEW, and has indigenousness and legitimacy. Family business is expected to play a role in contributing to the realization of a decentralized society as a driving force for an independent local economy.

In Japan, business start-up activity has been stagnating since the early 1990s, so the government began providing start-up support in the second half of the 1990s. Start-up support was explicitly introduced in the amended “Basic Law of Small and Medium Enterprises （SMEs）” in 1999 as a new and major goal of the SME policy. Additionally, the new “Basic Law” prescribes an appropriate sharing of SME policy resources between the central and prefecture or municipality governments considering regional and local circumstances. The national policy program for approving the “Start-up Support Business Plans” proposed by municipalities that began in early 2014 based on the “Law for the Strengthening of Industrial Competitiveness” integrated these two directions of the new “Basic Law” into a single policy for the first time. This policy also formed the basis for the “Regional Revitalization” policy that began in September 2014.

This policy has a unique scheme characterized by multilevel collaboration between national and local governments, and local public-private partnerships. The national government encourages municipalities to draw up and submit their own business plans to support start-ups in collaboration with local supporters, including chambers of commerce and industry, and local banks. Upon approval, the national government subsidizes municipality governments, local supporters, and individual founders. By January 2016, 1,000 proposals were approved from among 1,740 municipalities in Japan.

I empirically investigated the effects of this policy on local start-up ratios using municipality panel datasets. The estimation results for panel fixed-effects DID （difference-in-differences） models suggest that this new policy significantly increased the start-up ratios in municipalities with approved proposals compared to those without approved proposals, particularly the ratio of new corporations and subsidiaries of existing firms, as well as in municipalities that appeared unfavorable for start-ups.

In recent years, there have been growing expectations for regional revitalization and development through reward-based crowdfunding and hometown tax donation （Furusato Nouzei; quasi crowdfunding by local municipalities）, but as these markets expand, competition among projects nationwide is intensifying. Local companies and small and medium-sized enterprises （SMEs） alone are finding it difficult to compete in this market, as they may not be able to appeal to the public if they try to complete their projects with local resources alone. Also, as traditional e-commerce players have recently entered the market, attracted by the expansion of these markets, those local players are required to have higher quality in their products. In the early days, reward-based crowdfunding and Furusato Nouzei were expected to secure sales channels for local companies and small and medium-sized enterprises, but as the market has expanded, the competitive landscape of the market may have changed. We need to re-assess the degree of contribution of reward-based crowdfunding and Furusato Nouzei to regional revitalization.

This paper examines the prospects of industrial agglomeration in Osaka as a regional resource from a historical perspective. Industrial agglomeration has been seen as a source of high competitiveness for the Japanese manufacturing industry for years. However, the Japanese manufacturing industry and industrial agglomeration in Osaka have been in decline for about 30 years since the collapse of the bubble economy. Despite their decline, the manufacturing industry and industrial agglomeration are still important to Osaka’s regional economy.

We therefore explored the prospects for industrial agglomeration in Osaka when manufacturing industries were emerging in developing countries （especially in China） and information technology/modularization was being deployed in product architecture.

The first feature of industrial agglomeration in Osaka was the emergence of a diverse group of small and medium-sized enterprises （SMEs） to support the production of finished goods in the machinery industry during the period of high economic growth. The second feature was the segregation among the SMEs based on their skills in a particular field. The third was the formation of cooperative relationships between large companies and SMEs as well as among SMEs based on their skills, which led to process innovation and quality improvement in manufacturing. The development of these features was based on the unique experiences surrounding the development of manufacturing industries in Japan and Osaka during the period of rapid economic growth, and they are still in place today. They are needed even as China progresses and experiences industrial development. We believe that it is necessary to consider measures for economic revitalization that take advantage of these characteristics of industrial agglomeration in Osaka.

This paper focuses on the transformations of post-industrial cities in response to industrial hollowing-out and population decline by analyzing initiatives that combine social inclusion efforts and small business support to resolve regional divisions and disparities. We explore several initiatives that have aimed to overcome region-specific social issues related to the process of post-industrial urban transformation. As an example, we consider the case of Turin, Italy, a city that experienced significant population and regional decline related to changes in its industrial structure. The transformation of Turin, once the corporate base of Fiat Automobiles, provides hints for facing challenges that arise from industrial hollowing-out. In this paper, we consider the nature of regional revitalization by examining community-level job creation projects, support for venture businesses, and the shift from industrial cities to those focused on tourism and social inclusion.

In this study, we investigated the process of spinoff network formation and specified the conditions that facilitated the process. We focused on the concurrent emergence of multiple spinoffs resulting from exogenous pressure and investigated their collaboration across two generations. The spinoffs from the Morioka factory of Alps Electric Co. Ltd. were selected as the research target. Our findings revealed that the factory created innovative products, had a unique culture, and a history of creating spinoffs. Since 1992, the first-generation of spinoffs had started emerging as the result of corporate restructuring and engaged in contract prototype manufacturing, designing, and processing. Following 2002, the second-generation of spinoffs appeared after the sudden shutdown of the Morioka factory. They engaged in new product development. In both generations, the spinoffs from the Morioka factory successfully formed a collaboration network to support each other in a variety of ways. These networks were based on mutual confidence in their abilities and skills. Support networks extended to the Morioka factory alumni. Although employees left Alps Electric to work at other companies, some of them gave preferential treatment to the spinoffs. We also found that regional players, such as former customers, suppliers, and partner companies of the Morioka factory, the local government, and Iwate University played important roles in the survival of the spinoffs. Without these supports, the survival and network formations of the spinoffs would have been more difficult.