Masatoshi Sugiura graduated from ceramics department of Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1939, then entered Nippon Electric Company (NEC). In postwar years he transferred to Kunitoyo Leather Company in 1948, again transferred to Nagoya National Industrial Research Institute (NNIRI) in 1953, entered Kyocera as a research director in 1963. He became managing director in 1964, then executive managing director in 1972, and retired from the company in 1975.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the trajectory of Sugiura from the 1930s to the 1970s, through which to consider his contribution to the technological development of Kyocera.

The launch pad by which Kyocera could grow from a ceramic standalone manufacturer to a globally famous ceramic applied products firm was success of the mass production of IC package for electric calculators. Research and development activities on ceramic materials led by Sugiura and researches on precision processing of materials for electronic parts demonstrated by Yuzo Arai who was also an external talent came from research institute of electrical communication of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, largely contributed to the development of new product, IC package by Kyocera which was also supported by the accumulation of production technology at the workshops and absorption of imported technology.

Expansion and deepening of in-house technologies by invitation of excellent external personnel was one of the technology strategies of Kyocera in its founding period. The first example of such a technology strategy was Sugiura’s entry in 1963. Kyocera’s patent application activities was accelerated from 1963. Of the 17 patent applications filed in the 1960s, in 13 cases Kazuo Inamori was the first name of inventors, and in eight cases we can confirm Sugiura’s name as a co-inventor. From this fact we can know the role of Sugiura in R & D activities and patent applications in Kyocera in the 1960s.

Kyocera has been developing for over 60 years since its foundation in 1959 by pursuing a business diversification strategy. To understand how the company developed its organizational characteristics and competitive advantages, its multifaceted business structure must be disassembled into individual businesses because each business has its own external environment in terms of market, rivals, and direction of development. Only in this way can we analyze their interactions as a whole. As a part of this challenging research task, this study focuses on Kyocera’s electronics components business such as capacitors, printer heads and so on. Not only the primary sources at the company such as the company’s newsletter “Keiten Aijin” but also various external materials were used in this study to evaluate the company’s activities objectively.

In the initial period of the business, Kyocera was positioned as a “latecomer” in the market because many of its rivals had started their electronics components business earlier and enjoyed the explosive upsurge of market demand for electronics components for assembling radios and televisions in the 1950’s, just before Kyocera’s foundation. In the process of overcoming such adversity, Kyocera selected markets and timing to enter very carefully to avoid fierce price competition and to pursue a high value-added strategy based on its excellent “fine ceramics” technology.

Specially for Kyocera, it is indispensable to focus on the role of the founder of the company, Kazuo Inamori. His successors in the business adhered to Inamori’s policy and developed their ceramic technology instead of engaging in the business of electronic device assembly which looked more profitable at that time. As a result, the company has achieved a top class market share and its products are highly evaluated by many customers globally.

The principal aim of this research is set in pursuit of a leadership type that can be of universal validity and applicability. The search for Dr Kazuo Inamori’s leadership, therefore, serves as the first stepping-stone towards such a quest, hypothesising that Inamori’s management philosophy is of universal applicability.

The quintessence of Inamori Management Philosophy (and hereby, IMP) resides in its dynamic and praxis-driven nature, which Dr Kazuo Inamori, throughout his life career, created, crafted, nurtured, shared and, most significantly, proved its practical effect in business management for more than six decades.

Owing to the inductive dynamism within its application as well as its maturing context of further evolution, IMP has forged a multifaceted structure which adopts and integrates a wide array of Inamori’s long-term hands-on field knowledge, both tacit and explicit; Inamori’s philosophy has never been a mere set of metaphysical concepts but entrained direct actions of immediacy, determination, and learning-by-doing.

Hence, a single research perspective could provide us with merely an aspect of IMP’s multifarious characteristics; this must be illegitimate to carry out a full-dress inquiry into IMP to obtain new academic insights. Therefore, any IMP research necessitates multidisciplinary approaches, including general management, entrepreneurship, leadership, religious knowledge, economic thoughts, education, psychology, and even today’s neuroscience.

A recent publication in 2022 of Kase, Choi, and Nonaka’s trailblazing challenge to examine the dynamism and comprehensiveness of IMP presents forward-thinking multidisciplinary research. This article takes away a significant insight from their research findings with hermeneutic approaches, namely, the “Software” realm of IMP (or hypostasis, the conceptual substance), and provides a focused review of the vital foundation of IMP for both academic readers and business practitioners.

IMP is a philosophy of praxis or Walk the Talk, powered by bodily capturing as well as bodily assimilation. Inamori constantly stressed the significance of embodied cognition and knowledge as the crux of innovation; this article conveys a threefold analysis of IMP from eidetic intuition, Husserlian phenomenology (especially of, Noesis and Noema and intersubjectivity), and theory of the body. The essence of this study projects a view that the sinew of IMP remains Dr Kazuo Inamori’s firm belief in the oneness of body-mind in “Flow”, motivated and implemented genuinely by the spirit of “Rita” (利他), i.e., an Authentic Self, “Shinga” (真我), Making Selfless Commitment to the Betterment of Colleagues and Surroundings.

As a pressing future research implication, this article underlines the inevitability of multidisciplinary and collaborative research approaches to our better understanding of IMP henceforth.

This study attempts to understand the long-term evolution of human resource practices at the KYOCERA Corporation from the perspective of labor-management relations. The company’s human resource practices have historical periods, which are influenced by the personnel system that was fashionable for that era. As the company expanded, human resource practices were developed. By understanding the long-term transition, we were able to understand the relationship between organizational expansion and human resource practices. KYOCERA went through a period of organizational design beyond the individual response of management during its founding period, followed by the development of human resource practices for a large organization with more than 1,000 employees. The human resource practice completed in the early 1990s was ability-based personnel management. Kyocera subsequently faced an aging structure due to slowing corporate growth; however, did not change the system of management; instead, created a system that enabled the selection of human resources through system revisions and operational changes. This long-term history of personnel system reform is thought to generate discussion of human resource practices that are not influenced by fads.

This study introduces the KYOCERA Corporation’s oral history materials preserved in the Inamori Library. Oral history is defined as oral recordings of past events experienced by the narrator through the joint efforts of the listener and the narrator. It also included the preservation of oral materials. The interviews for the companies’ histories and the 50th anniversary film are stored in the archives of the Inamori Library. This list will be prepared for future public access and would be useful for the research of the KYOCERA Oral History Project, which began in 2022.