"Fujita and Hill compare and contrast Tokyo's innovation structure with the industrial districts model and the international hub model in the literature on urban and regional development. The model embraces and yet transcends both industrial districts and international hub models. The authors provide key elements making up the Tokyo model--organizational knowledge creation, integral and co-location systems of corporate research and development and new product development, test markets, industrial districts and clusters, participative consumer culture, continuous learning from abroad, local government policies, the national system of innovation, and the historical genesis of Tokyo in Japan's political economy. They find that the Tokyo model of innovation will continue to evolve with the changing external environment, but fundamentally retain its main characteristics. The lessons from the Tokyo model is that openness, a diversified industrial base, the continuing development of new industries, and an emphasis on innovation all contribute to the dynamism of a major metropolitan region. This paper--a product of the Development Research Group--was prepared for the East Asia Prospect Study"--Abstract.

This book focuses on overlooked contextual factors that constitute the urban creative climate or innovative urban milieu in contemporary cities. Filled with reflections based on interviews with a diverse range of creative actors in various local neighborhoods in Tokyo, it offers a rare glimpse into the complex set of elements that provide long-term, physical, and sociocultural support to urban creativity. Ursic and Imai highlight the interplay between physical and soft (social) factors in the process of place-making and explore how a city’s creativity is influenced by financial support and accessible infrastructure, as well as the sets of informal networks, services, and tacit, locally embedded knowledge that provide the basic layers of stimuli needed for creativity to fully develop. The authors show how the future development of creativity and the overall development of a city depend not only on the (top-down) planning strategies of formal authorities, but also on the appropriate (bottom-up) inclusion of heterogeneous elements that are provided and embedded within the small, hidden context of city spaces.

Technology is a key factor in global industrial competition, and Japan's national system of technological innovation has been vital to the economic success of the country since World War II. This book examines the historical development of the system, incl

Made in Japan examines the artistic dialogue between East and West as it played out between 1945 and 1970. During this post-World War II period, Japanese printmakers effectively acted as ambassadors, bringing their aesthetic traditions into fruitful interaction with contemporary American trends and forging ties with artists, scholars, museums, and collectors. This volume presents for the first time an integrated history of innovative visual experimentation and pioneering cultural patronage. The creative print (sosaku hanga) movement originated in the early twentieth century, when Japanese artists sought to modernize their practice by embracing Euro-American concepts of originality and autonomy. The movement matured in the decades following World War II, when second- and third-generation sosaku hanga printmakers continued to experiment in stylistic, technical, and thematic terms. From the early 1950s, Japanese printmakers participated in a newly global art scene, achieving great success at international art exhibitions sponsored by the American and Japanese governments. The prints in this book range widely in treatment and medium, embracing woodcut, stencil, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and screenprint. Made in Japan includes essays by Alicia Volk and Helen Nagata and biographies of the artists.

This book, first published in 1989, compares, contrasts and evaluates the nature, scale and direction of industry-academic interactions in Britain and Japan: the conversion of academic discoveries into practical products. Japan shows its outstanding ability to translate scientific ideas into high technology products. Within this wider investigation, detailed consideration is given to the manner in which these interactions promote innovation and technology transfer. The information in this study provides a perspective against which decisions can be made about industry-education interaction arrangements, and much of this information is largely unavailable outside Japan.

This book assesses the achievements of the software engineering discipline as represented by IT vendors in Japan in order to deepen understanding of the mechanisms of how software engineering capabilities relate to IT vendors’ business performance and business environment from the perspective of innovation and engineering management. Based on the concepts of service science and science for society, the volume suggests how to improve the sophistication of services between the demand side, i.e., IT user companies, and the supply side, i.e., IT vendors, simultaneously. The author and his colleagues developed a structural model including innovational paths, such as service innovation, product innovation and process innovation, and a measurement model including the seven software engineering capabilities: deliverables, project management, quality assurance, process improvement, research and development, human resource development and customer contact. Then they designed research on software engineering excellence and administered it with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Information-Technology Promotion Agency. Through statistical analyses of the results, they found that human resource development and R&D are significant fundamental conditions to improve the quality of the deliverables and that IT firms with high levels of deliverables, derived from high levels of human resource development, quality assurance, project management and process improvement, tend to sustain high profitability. In addition, they developed a measurement model based on Porter’s five forces and Barney’s resource-based view. A regression tree analysis suggested that manufacturer spin-off vendors tend to expand business with well-resourced R&D, whereas user spin-off vendors tend to depend heavily on parent company demand.