The US Council on Competitiveness published a report "No Recovery – An Analysis of Long-term US Productivity Decline" in 2016 and suggested a measurement illusion.

ICT advancement can be attributed to the dramatic advancement of the Internet which reacts to decrease prices of ICT due to its freebies, easy copying and mass standardization nature. It provides extraordinary services with a free culture but cannot be captured through GDP, leading to increasing dependency on un-captured GDP. This dependency corresponds to people preference shift from economic value to socio-cultural value that induces further advancement of the Internet and accelerates dependence on un-captured GDP.

An ICT-driven disruptive business model is based on this new stream which has been demonstrated by Uber's ride-sharing revolution, transformation of education in the digitally-rich learning environments, resurgence of live-concert streaming music and co-evolution between gender balance improvement and ICT advancement in Finland.

This special issue examines such disruptive innovation.

In recent years, ICT innovation is progressing more and more, such as the rapid popularization of smartphones, the increase of various information contents, the spread of services / applications such as SNS, the emergence of new collaboration tools called unified communication, the ubiquitous revolution by IoT. The development of such ICT is changing the creation of new business models, the work style in corporate organization and the lifestyle of human society. This sophistication of ICT will have a positive impact on the expansion of business opportunities of creation of new business models, as well as new employment and economic growth. However, on the other hand, it will also influence the essence of corporate management, organizational structure, organizational culture and even people̓s way of life. This special issue mainly focuses on keywords such as ICT industry, business model, change (or innovation), mainly on discussions from business & management such as information management, corporate strategy and venture business.

An analysis is offered on the relationship between traceability and sharing economy. Here, sharing economy is synonymous with "expansion of the right of use sales (as opposed to ownership)-oriented business model." Traceability is defined as "a state where the principle owner of property rights or product liability for some physical or intellectual property is able to continuously confirm the state of the property and who is using it." Under low traceability environments, businesses have no choice but to use the right of ownership sales-oriented business model. However, if advances in ICT realize high traceability environments, they will be able to adopt a model in which products are not sold and transferred, but in which only use rights are granted for a specified time in various form including rentals. Impact of barcodes and mobiles devices are analyzed to illustrate how traceability increased the level of sharing in supply chains.

The sharing economy which recently became a hot topic emerged under the pressure of the spread of "share" culture triggered by the Lehman shock. The background where such a change occurred was that macro level changes induced related innovation and had destructive effects on existing regimes. There is a possibility that this may anticipate the change suggested by the 4th industrial revolution in the future. Under such recognition, I analyzed the business model transformation of Uber, Airbnb, and explored the nature of the change of the future through this. The bird's-eye model to explore the macro change adopts the MLP (Multi Level Perspective) theory which is the bridging theory of evolutionary economics and technology transition theory.

Researchers have long studied the types of mission of corporate venture capital. In practice, however, some issues have recently been identified in those studied types of mission. Also, practitioners have started to set another type of mission for their corporate venture capital. In this article, I discuss those issues of the previously studied types of missions identified in practice, and new moves by corporate venture capital to solve them. I then discuss some research questions that recent practices raise.

In recent years, "work-style reform" has been receiving attention and pursued from not only labor laws, but also standpoints of environmental improvement and a support of workers. The environmental improvement of flexible work-style utilizing ICT is also a large issue due to an acceleration of a teleworkings' popularity, "a flexible work-style regardless of time and locations utilizing ICT", and lifting a ban in part-time jobs and side jobs, etc.

Targeting at perceiving a work-life balance is a main stream in teleworking of our country. Mainly, companies are commonly positioned in using benefits policies such as permitting working from home in 1 to 2 days a week for employees who are difficult to balance with commuting in order to perform childcare or nursing care, etc. Teleworking is often considered as a unique work-style; however, the unique style is getting to change into typical and normal work-styles. In addition, cases introducing teleworking are also getting to increase from viewpoints of productivity improvement, etc.

Teleworking recently has a remarkable trend of changes, such as "environment: from proprietary to shared", "location: from coexistence to cooperation", "public and private: from separate to mix", "tools: from individual to shared", and "operation: from ownership to utilization". Also, due to a rapid expansion of crowd sourcing that is one part of it, not only freelancers but also part-time jobs and side jobs of salaried workers are accelerating to increase.

Relationships with corporate organizations are expected dramatically to change for both salaried workers and freelancers by expanding teleworking that is a flexible work-style regardless of locations and time utilizing ICT.

NTT's laboratories were established in 1948 as the Electrical Communication Laboratories of the Ministry of Communication, four years later in 1952 became the Electrical Communication Laboratories of the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Public Corporation. It continues to exist after privatization and reorganization.

In this paper, we summarize the R & D strategy after 1952.

Changes in NTT's R & D strategy were (1) monopoly era (1952–1985), (2) competition era (1985–1999), (3) era of open (1990–2014), (4) B 2 B 2 X era (2014 Year). And we introduce how to proceed R & D in each era, along with examples.

This paper presents the research perspectives from the macro viewpoint of "corporate boundary dynamics" and the micro viewpoint of "organizational capability" regarding corporate strategy adapted to the evolution of convergence in advanced ICT era. As a first point, convergence is the viewpoint of accelerating "Collaborative Innovation" of people, organizations, companies and industries, and raising the possibility of creating a new business ecosystem by dynamically restructuring corporate boundaries. And as an element to decide the corporate boundary, this paper presents that the elements of "creativity-view" and "dialectic-view" as "boundary conceptions" held by stakeholders are important. Secondly, this paper points out the importance of "Dynamic Capabilities (DC)" as an organizational capability adapted to environmental change called convergence. In this paper, DC will increase the possibility of creating new innovation through asset orchestration of internal and external assets toward dynamic reconstruction of corporate boundary, inducing perception and cognition of new environmental change.

In this article, the author mentions the following three points as modern meaning of "Managing the Flow of Technology" which was published 36 years ago.

Firstly, direct communication is still important to the engineers, as it used to be.

Secondly, visualizing the flow of Information acquisition and dissemination into the organization is becoming more precise and with lower cost than before.

Thirdly, the findings that the space design of the workplace affects communication among engineers might be extended to not only building design but also urban design.

Three books are also recommended to be read together with this Allen̓s work. The readers can think more deeply about each of these three points.

Transferring materials is necessary for research in universities. However, there are currently some problems regarding material transfer: firstly, the delayed completion of the Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) due to the complexities of MTA terms and the procedure of MTA completion, and secondly, the large risk of infringing on others' rights brought about by modifications, inventions resulting from the use of materials, etc.

To solve these problems, we have begun managing all of the materials and the material transfer processes via a web system enabling an online application of the material transfer (MMC system). All researchers at the institution use the MMC system whenever they receive or send materials. As a result of the MMC system, the centralization of MTAs has been successfully implemented. The MMC system could also support the transfer of materials in compliance with laws related to the material transfers.

To promote industrialization of agriculture in Japan, it is critical to accelerate the development of excellent new varieties that meet market needs, especially the needs of the food industry. To date, there are limited studies which have quantitatively analyzed factors influencing the introduction of new varieties by the food industry.

Using the data of the questionnaire survey, this paper has analyzed the introduction of new varieties by the food industry. In the present study, by obtaining the information of new varieties from research institutes and to differentiate new varieties from existing one, the food industry's willingness to use new varieties increased.

This paper also revealed that the utilization of new varieties differs depending on the type of food industry.