The purpose of this paper is to analyze standardization activities of interfaces of automotive embedded system from a semiconductor supplier's point of view, and then try to indicate the germ of ‘Japanese open innovation system’ in this sector. In line with this purpose, we mainly focus on JasPar (Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture), a consortium set up in 2004 to promote standardization in software platform for automotive electronic control systems and in communication protocols. As for conducting in detail investigation toward its standardization activities, we deal with two working groups in JasPar: Microcontroller Working group and Conformance working group where semiconductor vendors actively engage themselves on the standardization activities of the debug interface and the FlexRay conformance test specification respectively.
In this paper, we raise a hypothetical question that European consortia is relatively good at managing the horizontal coordination among players that could be advantageous in promoting the creation and diffusion of a standard interface while Japanese consortia JasPar is relatively good at managing the vertical collaboration that could be advantageous in ensuring its interoperability by virtue of drafting the tight and narrow specification. This idea indicates the possibility of there being a transition process of Japanese open innovation system in the automotive sector from the old one characterized as ‘one-to-one’ type open innovation system often represented by Keiretsu system to the new one characterized as ‘M-to-N’ type open innovation system. The Japanese ‘M-to-N’ type is slightly different from the Europeans' in terms of the hypothetical question we mentioned above sense.

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