The purpose of this paper is to introduce how Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) captures the startups activity and some results of 2008 survey. In Japan we usually use Establishment and Enterprise Census by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in order to measure startup activity. However, this statistics has a couple of problems to reach the goal. For example this census is conducted at intervals of 2 or 3 years.Therefore any enterprise that begins her operation and stops it in the interval could not be counted. Other statistics also have some weaknesses. At present no official statistics is designed to measure entrepreneurship in Japan although we need to come up with effective policies to stimulate entrepreneurship under this recession. The way to know startups activity with accuracy is the first challenge to establish entrepreneurial society. The major objectives of GEM is to measure differences in the level of entrepreneurial activity between countries, to probe for a systematic relationship between entrepreneurship and national economic growth, and to uncover factors that lead to higher levels of entrepreneurship. 2008 research is its 10th year of GEM project and Japan has participated in GEM from the beginning.

This is an empirical study of Management Philosophy (MP) and its mechanism i.e. “what kind of MPs and how they affect management performance in Japanese small and medium-sized companies. We set a parameter model such as Independent Variable → Parameter → Objective Variable to prove four propositions about Philosophy-based management by the questionnaire survey data of 96 small and medium-sized companies in Japan. In the first examination between Independent Variables and Parameter, the contents of MP and the environmental factor did not show a positive impact on the degree of MP penetration. But MP penetration efforts as well as human resource management (HRM) functions showed significantly positive relations with the degree of MP penetration. In the second step between Parameter and Objective Variables, the degree of MP penetration showed statistically significant influence on the creative climate as well as the financial performance of ROA, though ROS was not significant. We concluded that there would exist the mechanism in which MP penetration efforts and HRM elements give a positive impact on the degree of MP penetration, and then would lead to a positive effect on the creative climate and the financial performance via the degree of MP penetration. Finally, some methodological issues were discussed for the future research.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize the phenomenon of resource creation and provide a framework for analyzing it. These days, we can see that some companies (and regions) with poor resource can find out unused-resources and succeed in utilizing them in unique ways. For these phenomenon, existing theories, such as resource based view (RBV) and dynamic capability, can’t provide enough explanation. Firstly, we discuss limitations of existing theories on explaining resource creation. Secondly, from 20 case studies scrutinized, we categorize them into 4 types of resource creation. We found the following process of resource creation; (1) redefining resources, (2) shifting viewpoint to resources, (3)creative combination of resources. Based on the discussion and case studies, we provide a framework for explaining resource creation and some issues that need further consideration.

Local governments nowadays are requested to carry out the administrative reform to solve their severe financial situation and to vitalize the local economy at the same time. As the reduction of their expenditure to cope with the administrative reform should cause the decline of the local economy, it is difficult to implement the administrative reform and the regional revitalization simultaneously. This study proposes the regional revitalization model which activate the local economy by outsourcing of the administrative affairs to the companies, NPOs, etc. in the area. The model was implemented at the Kochi prefectural government. The author was in charge of the implementation in the prefectural government and was devoted to the improvement of the model. The study was therefore a kind of action research. The implementation of the model shows us the effects, that is, the revitalization of the economy such as job creation, the activation of public private collaboration, and the administrative reform such as the reduction of expenditure including personnel expenses in the model. The model is applicable to every local government as the validity was checked at the Kochi prefecture without any peculiar condition.