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The Shifting Meaning of "Social Impact" and the Thought Behind Business
National defense and security are regarded as public goods. Because markets alone struggle to supply them sufficiently and their benefits are hard to limit to particular people, the state supports them through taxes. From the perspective that they produce benefits that underpin all kinds of activity, namely people's lives and safety (and fill a domain that markets alone struggle to supply)…
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Unbundling the University
The university is an institution with a longer history than the modern state or most companies. Over that long history, the university, as a vessel for nurturing knowledge and people, has endured across centuries. That is why I think the time horizon for considering the significance of the university should not stop at a few years of reform or a ten-year plan, but should be measured in decades, or even in generations…
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Organizing Company Creation into 12 Cells (Excluding Drug Discovery and Software)
I have been writing articles about company creation. In an earlier article, I divided company creation, in which a party other than the entrepreneur (such as an investor) is involved before the company is founded and launches it, into four kinds of "starting point": technology-driven, demand-driven, outcome-driven, and mission-driven…
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Organizing Postwar Japan in 25-Year Increments, and the Questions of the 2020s
As the 2020s enter their second half, I have been thinking a lot lately about what we should be asking now. One of those questions is 'thought,' which I have been writing about often in recent articles. I believe the direction of thought becomes the foundation of business and will greatly influence the future of business and startups...
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Thought and Capital 5 | Who Will Envision Japan's Future?
In March 1973, Sakyo Komatsu's Japan Sinks was published. It is a novel that depicts a future in which the Japanese archipelago sinks into the sea through crustal movement and people must leave their homeland. Within that same year it sold more than 3.8 million copies across its two volumes, which suggests that the future and the shape of Japan as a nation were being widely read about through fiction.
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Why Metascience for R&D Funding Matters
Troubling news about Japan's research capacity keeps coming. In the ranking of highly cited papers (Top 10% adjusted papers), Japan stays at 13th place on the 2022–2024 average using fractional counting, and the share of university faculty time spent on research has been declining over the long term. The number of doctoral program entrants...
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Thought and Capital 4 | How Thought and Capital Missed Each Other in Japanese Startups
In 1971, Tadao Kiyonari, Shuichiro Nakamura, Koji Hirao and others published "Venture Business: Small Giants That Sell Brainpower." Drawing on the Venture Capital that was rising in the United States, the book gave a name to a new kind of knowledge-intensive company, one that competes on its research, development and design capabilities and differs from the traditional small and medium-sized enterprise…
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How to Fight Over Innovation, and on What Timescale: Thinking in 12 Cells
The prototype of the gasoline automobile was built by Benz in Germany in 1886. It was Ford in the United States who brought it to mass production on a moving assembly line. After the war, Japanese automakers refined their production methods and quality control, improved price and reliability, and built a major position in the global market…
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The "Rules About Rules" That AI Needs
The faster AI produces text and code, the more human decision-making, such as review, approval, and quality assurance, becomes the bottleneck. If that continues, companies will want to go beyond having AI make proposals to humans and, under certain conditions, entrust it with judgment and execution as well…
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Thought and Capital 3 | How Thought and Capital Were Joined Again in the United States
In 1971, the year after Japan was caught up in the excitement of Expo 70, NASDAQ began in the United States. It was the public market that served as the exit for American startups. American VC had started with ARDC (American Research and Development C…