The 21st century is an era where the main arena for value creation is shifting to virtual space. From the perspective of companies and industries, usage of the virtual space has expanded to almost all industries including automotive, robot, retail, healthcare, agriculture, as well as foundational industries such as mobility, energy, civil engineering, and construction.

Behind this phenomenon are two key developments: first, the ability to recreate objects, assets, corporate activities in virtual space as Digital Twins; and second, the ability of these Digital Twins to generate the five types of new growth factors.

This special feature was planned against such a backdrop. We hope that this special feature will serve as a map and compass for business people involved in DX and for policy staffs, as well as academic researchers to find the direction they should take for the future.

In recent years, the Digital Transformation (DX) promoted by the Japanese government has not progressed as expected, leading to the emergence of the term "DX fatigue." Many companies have been struggling with DX initiatives, finding it difficult to achieve the desired outcomes. While there has been some technological progress with cloud computing, AI, and IoT, successfully implementing DX, which includes transforming organizations and businesses, requires proper management. This special issue reviews the current state of DX in Japanese companies and brings together experts from various fields to discuss the factors hindering DX, the mechanisms behind these challenges, and potential solutions. Of the five papers included in this issue, three focus on the issues of DX and corporate management. The remaining two papers address critical challenges related to AI technology and the innovation ecosystem driven by industry-academia collaboration, making them noteworthy for both businesses and policymakers. These papers collectively provide a structured analysis of the challenges and solutions for advancing DX, offering valuable insights for both practical application and further research.

As the Japanese domestic market shrinks, Japanese companies need to promote digital transformation (DX) and reform their operations, organizations, processes, corporate culture, and climate to increase their competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

In this report, I focus on the status of DX promotion in Japanese companies and the issues hindering its promotion, and discuss the causes and countermeasures.

In order to promote DX, it is essential for management to recognize and commit to DX as a company-wide initiative, and cooperation between management and IT and business divisions is also required.

In addition, in order to secure and develop human resources to promote the initiative, it is necessary to clarify the necessary human resource requirements and develop management systems for skill evaluation and treatment of human resources.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of linking the achievements of DX (Digital Transformation) in the manufacturing industry to corporate growth, and to discuss what hinders this process. Japanese companies have so far focused on improving operational efficiency and building cross-organizational manufacturing processes as part of their DX initiatives, achieving certain results. This can be considered a path-dependent innovation in the Japanese manufacturing industry, which has historically built its competitiveness on production sites, exemplified by the Toyota Production System. On the other hand, to monetize, the necessity of DX aimed at the market, such as "enhancing the added value of existing businesses through the introduction of digital technology" and "creating new digital businesses," is emphasized. This view stems from the concern that Japanese companies' DX initiatives remain limited to improving operational efficiency and do not lead to the creation of new value.

So, why does it not lead to value creation? What are hindering factors? This paper will examine the process by which Japanese companies can link the achievements of DX at the production site, in which they excel and have cultivated, to revenue and achieve corporate growth.

In an age when cutting-edge digital technologies such as IoT and AI can be utilized relatively easily, opportunities for digital innovation and digital transformation are increasing not only for large companies but also for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). On the other hand, there are various difficulties in realizing such digital innovation and transformation. Based on case analysis of SMEs working on DX promotion selected from METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan) DX Selection and Ishikawa Prefecture, this article summarizes the difficulties that SMEs face in promoting DX and introduces successful mechanisms for overcoming difficulties and taking advantage of opportunities. This article also compares large companies and SMEs from the perspective of DX promotion, then explains that SMEs are better suited for DX promotion than large companies from some viewpoints. In addition, this article shows research agenda on technology management, which is required for further DX promotion of SMEs.

With the advent of generative AI, machine learning technologies play an integral role in the digitization of society. Large language models (LLMs), a representative of the generative AI, are not free from issues regarding to social and ethical viewpoints, such as hallucination, or violation of privacy rights or copyrights. These problems originate from the basic mechanisms of LLM and are difficult to eliminate completely. Thus, engineering efforts are mandatory to complement the deficiencies of LLM, and a technology supply chain involving diverse actors is taking shape. In view of legal aspects, European AI-ACT is supposed to have a huge impact on the LLM business. However, the legal liability for the proliferation of technology leading to misuse or compensations for damages still remains uncertain. AI governance that all the actors, along the technology supply chain, work collaboratively on quality management of Trustworthy AI will reduce the hindrances to the dissemination of LLM.

In this paper, we look back on the transition of innovation ecosystems in Silicon Valley on the west coast of the United States and Boston on the east coast, and describe not only the emergence of technology, but also the formation of innovation ecosystems such as a climate rooted in the community, continuous support from the private sector, and large schemes based on national strategies.

Looking at the Midwest, which is a cluster of the automobile industry in this analogy, since the region is a cluster of OTs, consulting houses and IT vendors who want to grow DX as a business are actively investing, and national strategies such as the IRA Act and government-affiliated organizations such as CESMII are trying to accelerate their movement. We consider that the Midwest is in the preliminary stages of forming an innovation ecosystem related to DX. Through these, we will consider the requirements of the innovation ecosystem for DX.

This paper summarizes each review that six authors selected as an innovation management classic. At the same time, three other innovation management classics are selected in this paper to provide an overview of them, instead of concluding remarks.

We extracted the conceptual structure of skilled workers' manufacturing using ceramic artisans as a case study, and modeled the common conceptual structure using the action decomposition tree method, one of the methods of ontology engineering. In addition, we conducted an Internet survey to analyze the extent to which survey respondents who are engaged in manufacturing themselves have acquired and recognized common conceptual structures, with the aim of explicating the concepts of skilled workers and the process by which they are acquired. As a result, 19 common conceptual structures were extracted by the action decomposition tree method, and the model was made explicit. The survey results also suggested that the concepts needed or used differ depending on the type of manufacturing and years of experience, as well as the order in which the upper ranked concepts of manufacturing and the lower ranked concepts to achieve them are acquired and recognized.

In this research, trends in industrial interest in the results on the innovative High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) utilization research centered on the K computer and the Fugaku were analyzed. So far, in the analysis of downloads (DL) to the HPCI user reports from the industrial world, the analysis is based on the number of DLs only for the industrial use projects and the DL organizations are classified according to the classification of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. This research extended the projects other than industrial use, introduced the following new perspectives and methods, and was able to clarify the trend of interest from the industrial world in more detail and comprehensively; (1) Comparison of analyses based on the number of DLs and the number of DL organizations, (2) Introduction of user report attention evaluation indexes which are applicable even if implementation years and types of projects of user reports differ.

The purpose of this research is to clarify the decision-making processes and influential factors of organizations. Human beings make decisions to avoid bounded rationality, however, decision failures are repeated even in organizations. Recently, research of behavioral economics reveals individual anomalies gradually. Hyperbolic discounting means a subjective time discounting rate that tends to decrease from the near future to the distant future. And explain the irrational human behavior of preferring short-term utility at the expense of long-term utility. In this paper, we propose a Double Garbage Can Model, which is an extension of the Garbage Can Model, which is a collective decision-making model under ambiguity, and simulate the influence of individuals with hyperbolic discounting on collective decision-making. As a result, hyperbolic discounting suggests a negative impact that can lead to collective decision-making that prioritizes short-term profits, while also suggesting a positive impact such as avoiding situations where nothing can be decided.

Agriculture, especially rice cultivation, has been a traditional industry, and because of this tradition, innovation has been relatively difficult to come by. In this context, the new high-density rice seedling cultivation and planting innovation "MITSUNAE" has had a great impact on rice cultivation. This innovation was conceived by a farmer and realized in concert with an agricultural equipment manufacturer and a public research institution. This report describes the process of development and diffusion of "MITSUNAE" as an example of agricultural innovation, and discusses the factors that led to its success from the viewpoints of technology management. The necessity of technology management in the agricultural sector will also be discussed.