Nowadays, many firms in Japan are trying to introduce Supply Chain Management (SCM). Some researchers have pointed out the difficulty of inter-organizational consensus building on process innovation in the supply chain. The frameworks and models in previous studies, however, do not sufficiently explain how interorganizational consensus building is achieved and how it leads to the process integration in the supply chain. This paper proposes a conceptual model on the dynamic relationship that the consensus for cross-organizational goal or policy on process innovation in supply chain is built, operational patterns within each organization are modified, the supply chain process is integrated, and performance is improved. The conceptual model is developed through fact finding from case studies of three manufacturers in the food and beverage industries. It is also developed through a theoretical interpretation using the concept of organizational capability that is often discussed in a resource-based view (RBV) of a firm’s strategic management.

It is important for cellular operators to develop new services to gain users. It is also important to decide to make the service platforms open or not because of the existence of a dilemma that the open platforms gain a lot of contents, but are easy to imitate. To evaluate how the platform strategies of cellular operators affect gaining contents and users, 1) some hypotheses about the platform strategy are investigated from statistical data, and 2) a simulation model of the cellular phone market was developed using an empirically valid parameters estimated from real statistical data. From simulations, the authors detected some scenarios to break the current market dominance.

In the period of uncertain and complex global business situation, the issue of next business leader development has been strategically important. Since around year 2000, many large Japanese companies have developed the program for developing next generation leaders. However, those practices have not been made disclosure.

Based on twenty detail case studies of Japanese large corporation, the following points are found.

1) The next generation leaders’ development program is basically composed of “selection–training–strategic deployment.” In general terms, the training in this context is considered less important compared with real business experience. However, in the training, variety of learning experience including top executive’s mental set, simulated experience as business executives through action learning are provided. Such training has played important role of catalyst to next generation leaders’ individual development and improvement of organizational capability.

2) The training has playing the important role as “field” of creating emergent strategy in developing “Leadership Network” composed of leadership generativity and social capital among business leaders. In addition, it is suggested that “Leadership Network” will be able to contribute to create emergent strategy.

The aim of this paper is to answer how the relationship between inventors should be for knowledge creation from a view of technological distance. The author investigated a case of corporate merger in domestic chemical industry and used the firm’s patents issued before and after the merger to find effective conditions to occur co-inventions within and between the firms. The analysis showed that under the within-the-firm condition, the shorter the technological distance among inventors, the higher the inventive productivity was. In contrast, longer technological distance was advantageous to inventive novelty. Also, the analysis under the between-the-firm condition revealed the importance of making moderate technological distance for inventive novelty. From the facts, the author pointed out the possibility that effective management for knowledge creation depends on whether inventions occur within an organization or between organizations.