Recognizing that a capacity to innovate and commercialize new high-technology products is increasingly a key for the economic growth in the environment of tighter environmental and resource constraints, governments around the world have taken active steps to strengthen their national innovation systems. These steps underscore the belief of these governments that the rising costs and risks associated with new potentially high-payoff technologies, their spillover or externality-generating effects and the growing global competition, require national R&D programs to support the innovations by new and existing high-technology firms within their borders. The National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) has embarked on a study of selected foreign innovation programs in comparison with major U.S. programs. The "21st Century Innovation Systems for the United States and Japan: Lessons from a Decade of Change" symposium reviewed government programs and initiatives to support the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises, government-university- industry collaboration and consortia, and the impact of the intellectual property regime on innovation. This book brings together the papers presented at the conference and provides a historical context of the issues discussed at the symposium.

Using comparative studies and original research, this book discusses the extent to which the Japanese economy encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, University of Northampton, language: English, abstract: Japan is the second largest industry nation in the world. At the end of World War II Japan was in ruins and lagged far behind the industrialized and experienced western nations. However, it has managed to compete against almost all other countries in relatively short time without any appreciable help. The small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as the main corporation form have played a crucial role for the country’s miracle and development of the modern economy after the war, as large companies were all destroyed, people have lost their livelihood and world markets were shrinkage. Today, the small and medium-sized enterprises are still serving as the driving and dominant force for the domestic economy. According to JETRO (2002), the total number of small and medium-sized enterprises in Japan are 6.51 million, which represent 99.1 % of the total businesses (excluding primary industry); SMEs’ contribution amounts to 81% of the total employment (excluding employment in the prime industries), 51.7% of the total shipment of manufacturing industry, 61% of the total sale in the whole sale and 78% in the retail. Clearly, the growth of the Japanese SMEs depends on several success factors, such as technologies, marketing skills, capital funds and effective resource management in the last four decades (Ohmea, 1982). However, some western countries like U.K. and France were using the same development strategy as Japan after the World War II, and their economies still declined dramatically competing with Japan. Therefore, there must be some special influential factors in the Japanese companies that are totally different from western models. This paper focuses mainly on the socio-cultural development of SMEs in Japan with typical Japanese characteristics and analyses the influential yet distinguishing success factors and their implications for the Japanese SMEs. The paper will further approach the socio-cultural disadvantages of the existing systems and the government roll for Japanese SMEs and draw conclusion in the last section.

Outline of government policy in respect of medium and small enterprises of the manufacturing industry and other small scale industry plants in Japan - covers the modernisation of business organization, credit facilities for renewal of equipment, management reforms, taxation, financing, measures to facilitate cooperative activities and to encourage mergers, the implementation of research projects, etc., and comments on relevant legislation. Diagrams and statistical tables.