The purpose of this study is to examine empirically the strategies for regional core companies in the building-up process of the wine cluster in Hokkaido. In this study, HOKKAIDO WEIN was selected as the case of a regional core company. This article suggests that the networking strategies by these companies have important influences on their heterogeneity and competitive advantages. They are technological innovators in the wine industry in Hokkaido. In the initial stage, HOKKAIDO WEIN had accumulated its organizational capabilities and developed strong relationships with its contracting farmers. Mutual trust between HOKKAIDO WEIN and farms was promoted through the policy to local produce product. Thus, regional core company improved the quality of the relational capabilities with their local farms. Our research identified that the symbolic action by the entrepreneur of the regional core companies had positive effect to upgrade their organizational capabilities. Therefore, this paper suggests that management philosophy and networking strategies of the regional core companies will play an important role in the building-up process of the wine cluster. In conclusion, it was observed that the strategies for regional core companies had realized the network management and sustained competitive advantage in their initial stage. Specifically, regional core companies exploited regional resources in the building-up process of the wine cluster.

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This paper proposes the cause of discrepancy between Knowledge Management (KM) and Human Resource Management (HRM) to support cross-fertilization of them. Originally, KM and HRM should develop together and encourage each other, because knowledge is generated by human resource and its value can be established only through the use of it by human resource in a real society. However, previous academic research and business activity has dealt with KM and HRM independently, and they have not refer to their relationship. To reveal the cause of this discrepancy, we review previous literatures of KM and HRM to explore the central subject, its transition, and the background factor as the premise of research in each management domain. Through literature review, we found that the cause of this excess independency could systematically come from their research approach. Thus, previous researches have premised the uniformity of individuals who compose an organization, which provided the lack of consideration of individual capability, and they have not fully discussed the mechanism of realizing individual creativity and achieving performance. As a result, the view point of individual, which might connect two management domains, has been missed and KM and HRM could be recognized as independent research fields. Therefore, it is expected that to reveal thought process of creative individuals would work as a bridge between KM and HRM to promote mutual interaction in a real society.

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It is widely recognized that design is an important dimension of innovation. Recently, a lot of researchers focus on the relationship between design and technology in order to achieve the innovation. This paper defines design as “Design is making sense (of things)”. In this definition, the relationship between design and technology means how the technological innovation contributes to improving semantic values (meanings), but only a few studies examined this issue. The purpose of this paper is to show what kind of technologies contribute to a radical innovation of meanings and how companies strategically make a decision to invest the technology for rational values, which is spec and functionality, or the one for meanings. This paper has a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Flat Panel Display industry. In qualitative analysis, this suggests that FPD industry transition their technology development from the technology for rational value to the one meaning because of technology commoditization. In quantitative analysis, this paper suggests that technology research and design research have some effect on their output each other. Few studies examined the empirical evaluation of the meanings from a technology perspective in the design management discipline. Therefore, this framework might plays a significant role in order to address the interdisciplinary research in the design management and technology management disciplinary.

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This paper’s purpose is to develop a theory of routines. In this paper, I propose a revised concept of routines, especially those that have ostensive and performative aspects. The framework is a leading and key conceptual tool for understanding organizations but is problematic and obscure. The problem and obscurity comprise three points. First, the performative aspect of a routine is observable and so are the many related artifacts (manuals, standards, documents, etc.). However, the ostensive aspect of a routine and the artifacts are not observable. Second, should we tolerate unobservable real existence? Is this one of those trivial scientific-philosophical problems? The ostensive aspect of a routine, in my opinion, is redundant. In this paper, I presume that the ostensive aspect is not real and is only a conceptual tool. Third, various concepts of routines have been used in organizational literature. In this paper, I summarize and reinterpret the main uses of the concept. To develop the revised concept of routines, I conducted qualitative research on the sales routines of insurance agents in Osaka, Japan. I chose the qualitative approach because of how I wanted to investigate the agents’ operations. I was interested in examining in detail the mechanism of their routines, specifically the constituents of the routines and how they interplay with each other. In order to avoid the complexity that characterizes previous models of routines, I needed to adopt the quantitative instead of qualitative approach. However, I am unable to perform a quantitative study on my own. The sales routines of insurance agents seem to be theoretically important, because their routines have two important aspects. First, their sales operations appear to be relatively free from manual-like norms. Sales operations vary as attributes of sales change (e.g., who the customer is, the customer’s characteristics, and where and when negotiations are done). It is plausible that the sales routines of insurance agents are flexible. Second, their operations are also bound at various levels of social institutions (e.g., by insurance laws, industrial regulation, and documents). These rules are often compulsive.

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The objective of this study is to find the key success factors for business intelligence (BI) market in Japan. First, the key factors for choosing a BI product were estimated by interviews with several customers of each BI vendor. The results showed that the characteristics of products (including both software and consulting services provided by BI vendors) were the most important for customers, compared with other factors such as prices, deliveries or trade records in the past. Second, the dynamics of “product architecture” of BI software and consulting services were analyzed in order to find how the superiority of winners’ products was established. The results indicated that the dynamics of winners’ architectures had following three features: (1) the architecture of both software and consulting services were “closed” at first, (2) the architecture of consulting services had firstly changed from “closed” to “open”, and (3) the architecture of software had secondly changed from “closed” to “open”. On the other hand, the architectures of losers’ products had opposite dynamics: firstly software’s architecture had firstly become “open”, and then services’ architecture had secondly been “open”. Those results indicated the differences of the dynamics of product architecture can be dominant factors for success in BI market.

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Organizations seek innovation not only by themselves but also through open innovation activities. This exploration is manifested in various activities such as innovation contests, design competitions and innovation communities. In this context, one of the key activities that promote open innovation is the “hackathon.” The hackathon is an event in which voluntary members, such as software engineers and designers, are gathered and develop useful applications in a short time. This new type of collaboration has received much attention as a means of promoting open innovation. Previous studies have addressed the motivation of participants, the demographics of participants and prize structures for open innovation activities. However, they cannot explain how we should design the process of activities. Organizers of hackathons face high uncertainty regarding the outcome of these events. It is necessary for managers and policy makers to identify the key factors that determine the performance of ad-hoc teams in hackathons. The purpose of this study was to derive specific design principles that can improve team performance in hackathons. Here, we demonstrate that data-driven application development in hackathons is a more effective process design than the needs-driven application development that has typically been implemented in recent hackathons. To test our hypotheses, we held two hackathons with open data resources, conducted surveys and statistical methods (regression analysis and t-test). We find that data-driven application development can create products by combining existing services, technologies and data. In addition, the output of data-driven application development can be evaluated as a highly developed application. This result indicates that data are a key factor in promoting innovation via new combinations of existing resources, knowledge and methods. Although the process design of hackathons was analyzed in this study, the discussion presented can be understood as engaging the traditional problem of collaboration design and should thus aid in further research.

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Researches on online business are developed as those business spread out quickly. However, hardly exists a research that analyzes the success factor of the specific industry or specific business quantitatively. Especially, in the economy of advanced nations, although a non-manufacturing industry is important, the research on the process of innovations, such as an A-U model, has been concerned only about the manufacture field. Therefore, I analyze two questions at the online securities industry of Japan which is a typical non-manufacturing industry in this research, focusing especially at time before and after a dominant design appear. (1) By what kind of pattern does adoption of product innovation and process innovation progress? (2)What kind of influence does adoption of the process of an innovation have on the achievements of a company? The results are that, (1) On each company level, the occurrence rate of product innovation is high at first, and the occurrence rate of process innovation is low. Although, after a dominant design appears, while the occurrence rate of product innovation falls, the occurrence rate of process innovation increases, and that, (2) Before and after adopting a dominant design, it was verified that a difference arises in the performance of each company.

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Though a body of research has revealed that the early definition of a product concept is beneficial for new product development, some authors have suggested that concept shifting during is necessary in a particular situation. Concept shifting is crucial in some case, but its process is not well understood. In this study, in order to understand concept shifting in more detail, I try to develop a framework based on Daft and Weick’s (1984) organization as interpretation system perspective. Four product development cases, where concept shifting occurred in three cases and does not occurred in one case, are studied and two major findings are obtained. First, project team’s assumptions about the environment is changed from analyzable to unanalyzable with a concept shifting. When a project team faces to information inducing concept shifting, the product concept becomes unstable and thus the project team changes their information scanning mode. Second, based on first finding, a process of concept shifting can be broken down into three patterns, which is “unstable concept shifting”, “active concept shifting” and “passive concept shifting”. My conclusion is that these patterns help us to understand an organizational process of concept shifting as an information interpretation system.

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More than thirty years have passed since researchers began studying organizational culture and it is no longer faddish. Three decades is more than enough time to allow scholars still interested in organizational culture to explore one of the early literature’s significant, but unproven claims: the effect of organizational culture on organizational mortality. In this research, drawing on evidence from Japanese and US companies, therefore I explore the effect of organizational culture on organizational mortality or, conversely, organizational survival. The results of survival analysis revealed that culturally strong companies from Japan as well as the US had a high likelihood of survival beyond the turn of the century and into the present. They also showed that, even after controlling for the country effect or irrespective of differences in national environments, a strong culture can sustain organizations over a long period. Based on the research results, I can show how my research can contribute to the area of organizational culture studies in particular and to the area of management studies in general. Among others, it has uncovered a significant, but unproven claim made in the early organizational culture literature, i.e., that organizational culture is capable of negatively affecting organizational mortality or, in other words, of enhancing organizational survival. My research also has managerial implications. Among others, the results suggest that managers should manage their organizational culture from a long-term perspective. This is because the relationship between organizational culture and organizational survival seems to be tenuous from a short-run perspective, but it proves to be strong and robust in the long run.

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We investigated call center A to explore relationships between personal networks and performances in work places. In call center A, two leaders (LDs) were promoted to supervisors (SVs) at May 2011. Then, performances, measured by average handling time (AHT), and turnover rate improved. To clarify the effects of personal networks in call center A, we used (1) personal networks data in call center A obtained by questionnaire survey at April 2011 and (2) performance data including objective data such as AHT and turnover rate. The LDs, who were promoted May 2011, were revealed to be central in informal personal network in call center A. And, we confirmed performance improvement by comparing individual AHTs at April 2011 and September 2011 and by examining monthly performances of call center A as a whole. Then, we argue why the performance improved. This result that the promotions of central employees in personal networks improved performances has profound significance in practice. Although the literature pointed the importance of managing employees’ informal personal networks, it is often difficult to manipulate them arbitrarily. On the other hand, investigating central employees in personal network and promoting them, as in call center A, is more viable approach to improve performances.

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The literature on identification in organizational contexts is rapidly growing during the past two decades. Recently, many studies have probed complexity of identification in the terms of multiple identification. However, past research has mainly focused on identifications with groups of which membership is formal and evident. Drawing on social identity approach, which emphasizes on cognitive aspect of identification, this study explores identification with psychological groups to expand studies on multiple identification. Specifically, identification of ex-members with former organizations is investigated. Based on previous studies, four hypotheses are proposed. First, identification with former organizations is weaker than identification with present organizations due to salience hierarchy. Second, identification with former organizations has a significant positive correlation with identification with present organizations. Third, perceived prestige with former organization has a significant effect on identification with former organizations. Fourth, identification with former organizations has a significant effect on supportive behaviors for former organizations. These hypotheses were tested and supported with data obtained from two internet research companies (N=825). Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed. These results show that longitudinal expansion of target for identification would be fruitful for studies on multiple identification in organizational contexts. Furthermore, these results suggest that paying attention to supportive behaviors of ex-member and their identification could be one of the approaches for enhancing company reputation.

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Management philosophy can unify the identity of the organization.This study is an essay from the a micro level viewing angle which act as the roles and functions of the organization members in promoting of penetration in management philosophy, investigating the reconciliation of principles-based personal identity and organizational or social identity. More specifically, using the small and medium enterprises engaged in service industry as target, this study using single case,focused on relationships between organizational identity or the percetration of social identity and personal identity of top manager which centered on management philosophy. As a result, towards the construction of a cooperation system by promoting penetration of management philosophy, it turns out that assuming the establishment of the personal identity of top manager which centered on management philosophy, the sympathy and acceptance by organization members is really essential. For social identity discussed in this study,the process and background of formation is various ,and the variability is high. As a company, it is difficult to estimate how far should make organizational activation work. However,in a variety of interactions with stakeholders such as customers, it need to make perception flexibly in cooperation. In the future, it required verification by the case study of cross-sectoral basis for the results of this study.

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In this paper, the research question is "In mergers between listed companies, what is the optimal structure of the Board to improve the post-merger performance " The purpose of this research is to clarify structure of the Board after the merger are to determine what factors the pre-merger company, and factors of pre-merger companies affect the post-merger performance. Therefore, two analyses are carried out in order to serve the purposes. First, in the post-merger structure of the Board, examined whether the officers come from either of the two pre-merger companies, and it is estimated by the ordered probit model in order to show how this ratio will affect the internal factors of the two pre-merger companies. But, it is not able to show the effect of internal factors on the post-merger performance in this analysis. Thus, as an additional analysis, it is the analysis of variance using the internal factors of the pre-merger companies. The results of these analyzes, it is showed that internal factors of pre-merger companies are giving an effect on the initiative of the post-merger structure of the Board. This finding is not found in previous studies. Moreover, by analysis of variance, the number of division depending on which many in the pre-merger companies, the difference has occurred in the post-merger performance has been shown.

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Christensen (1997) describes market share turnaround processes, based on intensive case studies of Hard Disk Drive, or HDD industry. Even though established large firms are vulnerable to disruptive innovations, previous models have not explained the underlying mechanism definitively. To address this issue, we develop and use a modified Adner and Zemsky (2005) model. In this non-cooperative game model, two firms are assumed to supply same type of product. One firm, which is assumed to be an initial significant occupant of the market, offers products manufactured with mainly established technologies, and these are superior on the primary dimension. The other firm tries to make horizontal differentiation with new technologies. The demand depends on a net effect which represents switching cost, network externality of existing products, the value created by the new technologies and so on. This enables us to consider various relations between established and new products. So we show an example in which the new product ends up a niche (secondary or isolated) market because of the cost and other advantages gained by the established technology-firm. In contrast, there is a case where the firm adopting the new technology dominates the markets and enjoys the monopoly price. Here, the new technology-product is considered to win high evaluation by consumers. This case also implies that the cost advantage is not the necessary condition for the occurrence of disruptive innovations.

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It is an important action for adaptation to the hollowing out of industry to switch a customer or industry. In order to realize that, first of all, many people think up to switch of the business structure and the business model. However, we came across the SMEs which adapted to the hollowing out of industry without switching the business structure or the business model in a pre-field-research. Those companies arranged existing business routinely. In addition, they achieved switching of a customer or industry by repeating arrangements routinely. Which adaptation pattern is a mainstream as the actual situation for Japanese companies? In this paper, we introduce the result of the preliminary research for answering this question. We researched about 20 SMEs located in the Suwa region of Nagano prefecture. The 20 companies all experienced the hollowing out of industry 20 years ago. Moreover, those companies have survived on the same scale until now. Only ten companies adopted a pattern to switch business structure or business model. On the other hand, 19 of 20 companies adopted a pattern to arrange existing business routinely. Even if it takes fewness and deflection of the number of the samples into account, it is an extremely interesting result. In this paper, we suggest the possibility that there is the secret mainstream of an adaptation pattern for the hollowing out of industry of SMEs.

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The purpose of this research is to reveal the process of the growth of a new venture group in terms of the investment in spin-offs and the instability of the group domain. SoftBank Group (SBG), consisting of SoftBank Corp and its spin-offs, is chosen for our study. Our database includes data sourced from the securities reports of the spin-offs from SoftBank Corp, and the database is used for analysis using the networking analysis software named “Pajek Version2.05”. The followings are found in our study. (1) Spin-off companies have been created in SBG through the allocation of financial resources for each segment. (2) Group domain of SBG has changed by developing the spin-offs at the early stage, and by Merger and Acquisitions at the later stage. (3) SBG creates spin-off companies not only at each company level but at segment (aggregate of companies) level. he implications of our study are as follows. (1) Our study shows the validity to understand the spin-off phenomenon from the point of view of resource allocations rather than that of entrepreneurs. (2) It is suggested that we should observe both spin-offs and the 'maternal' organization to study the change of the group domain. (3) It's implied that another organization model, called Type-F (Fund), might be required. SoftBank Corp plays a role similar to an investment fund in our study. However, there are three limitations of this paper. (1) The analysis is conducted only from the point of financial resources, not that of human resources. (2) The survey didn’t analyze the change of each spin-off. (3) Causal relationships between the development of spin-offs in/as the group and the change of group domain weren't made clear in our study. In order to challenge these limitations, the quantitative analysis for each spin-offs are required to improve the robustness of our study.

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Results from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor indicate that Japan has an exceptionally low rate of business startups, further limiting quantitative research on Japanese entrepreneurship. Recently, however, the emergence of social media has fueled the rapid growth of web and mobile-related businesses that do not require much initial investment, resulting in a sizable number of startups even in Japan, despite the immature investment environment. Our research examined whether the determinants of entrepreneurial activity that have been identified in Western research apply to the Japanese setting. We targeted our survey to web-related startups operating in the Tokyo metropolitan area. By restricting the field of industry and the geographic area, we could control variations relating to environmental factors such as economic trends specific to some fields, locational factors, the labor market, and accessibility to investors and customers. We could thus examine more clearly how an entrepreneur’s personal characteristics, firm resources and strategies relate to business growth. We then predicted that an entrepreneur’s active performance, management team, business concept, product positioning and availability of external support would predict business growth. Business growth was measured with a performance index that asked owners to rate their business conditions over the last six months relative to their competitors and to their own past performance. As for management teams, we examined the number of founders and whether or not each management team had changed since its start. In the U.S., it is common for a CEO and a CTO to be the founders, but in Japan it is more common for the same person to serve as the CEO and CTO. Past research indicates that additions and changes to a management team facilitate business growth. Business concept refers to the degree to which one places importance on market size, market growth, and the newness of a product when identifying a business concept. Product positioning refers to the degree to which entrepreneurs emphasize quality, cost, niche, and having a totally new product when distinguishing one’s product from that of their competitors’. Product positioning was adapted from the Startup Genome Report (2011), a survey of WEB businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. The availability of external support was measured in terms of investment from VCs and the number of mentors. Our sample consisted of 90 entrepreneurs running a web or a mobile-related businesses in the Tokyo metropolitan area. A web survey was administered from February to August 2012. Sixty percent were within two years and 70 percent were within three years of foundation. All but two respondents indicated their nationality as Japanese. Sixty-nine were novice entrepreneurs while 21 were serial entrepreneurs. Thirty-seven started the business alone. Eighty had been previously employed. We computed correlations and regression coefficients to examine the relationships between variables. As predicted, all four characteristics of active performance (i.e., active planning, active goal setting, active feedback seeking, network size and diversity) significantly predicted business growth. Business growth was also related to the management team: the larger the number of founders and the more frequent the changes in the team, the greater the business growth. Placing importance on market size, market growth, and newness of the product when identifying a business concept also predicted business growth. As for product positioning, having a totally new product was the only factor predicting business growth. External support, defined as the number of available mentors and investment from VCs in Series A, also predicted business growth.

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Social scientists credit science with stimulating technological invocation and with it economic growth. We management theorist also believe that theories do help us organize our thoughts, generate explanations, and improve our predictions. In American/Western context, however, many researchers in our field point out that the gap between science and practice is so persistent and pervasive that our theory has been lost its relevance. Over the past decade, several attempts to deal with such problem have evolved in the form of movements toward “evidence-based management: EBM.” In response to EBM movement, in this “theme session” we try to rethink about the problems of researcher-practitioner linkage (RPL) in Japanese context. Our session consists of three separate parts. In the first part, based on the result of survey research we discuss about diffusion of management theory. In this part we try to develop a framework that will guide us in taking steps necessary for increasing the probability that practitioners will implement our findings. This may enable us to understand how transfer of knowledge (management theory) occurs and why. In the second part, we theoretically and empirically discuss about inter-organizational trust. As prior studies have suggested, the existence of inter organizational trust decrease uncertainty in inter-organizational exchanges and can enhance the performance of both practitioner and researchers. And our empirical research supports this. And finally, in the third part we think about RPL from the perspective of educational technology. Discussing about “evidence-based education” and analyzing data from some academic-industrial collaboration projects we try to draw some implication about RPL.

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