星野 雄介

This study investigates the strategic orchestration of New Product Development (NPD) teams, focusing on how age diversity influences their innovation capabilities within the competitive landscape of firms. As firms encounter an evolving demographic landscape, the role of team composition, particularly age diversity, becomes critical in tuning innovation and market alignment. This paper synthesises the disparate findings from the innovation management literature on the impact of age diversity, employing dual theoretical perspectives: information/decision-making and similarity/categorisation. The former suggests that age diversity brings diverse knowledge that boosts innovation, while the latter indicates it might hinder social cohesion and team performance. Addressing the gaps in existing research, this study explores tenure diversity and team familiarity as moderators in the age diversity–performance relationship. It hypothesises that tenure diversity can enhance knowledge exchange and innovation but may complicate social interactions, whereas high team familiarity might restrict new idea generation by homogenising knowledge. Empirical analysis conducted on a dataset of 21,370 observations from Japanese sake breweries reveals that tenure diversity and team familiarity are critical in moderating the effects of age diversity on NPD outcomes. These findings enrich the NPD literature by highlighting the importance of demographic diversity and provide new insights into managing age-related dynamics in team settings. The study underscores the need for managerial strategies that leverage demographic diversity to enhance NPD effectiveness.

Since the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development presented its comprehensive Innovation Strategy in 2010, numerous countries have been updating their innovation policies. Subsequent to the promulgation, the innovation policies of Japan shifted the focus from discipline-specific to social issue-oriented approaches. This study investigates the response of the Japanese academic sector to this policy shift and the characteristics of the research projects associated with innovation policy by utilizing descriptive statistics from policy documents and the database of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research. The findings reveal that Japanese researchers have increasingly aligned their efforts with government-proposed research themes in recent years, with a notable shift toward short-term research projects. Moreover, Japanese universities are undergoing reforms that are transforming them into entrepreneurial institutions by altering incentive structures. Although these reforms may yield short-term research outcomes, they may not always address long-term societal needs. The narrowing focus on research themes could restrict the potential impact of research and impede the development of innovative solutions to societal challenges. From this viewpoint, assessing the relationship between government-proposed research themes and the research productivity of Japan is critical. Universities and public research institutions play a vital social role in broadening the foundational knowledge base through basic research, while private enterprises may lack the motivation to invest in research and development with low appropriability. These results may be beneficial for policymakers in reconsidering the division of labor in industry-academic collaboration in a knowledge-intensive economy.

How does a platform leader create its own platform and keep its platform profitable? This paper aims to explore platform management, focusing on NTT docomo that is the largest Japanese mobile network communications operator. In the startup phase of a new platform-mediated market, NTT docomo created two-sided markets with network effects between hardware and software through a common platform, such as i-mode service that were the first commercially mobile internet system. In addition, NTT docomo could keep its platform profitable because technological obsolescence caused by the continuous evolution of i-mode services stimulated its subscribers to replace. Such sustaining innovations to raise incomes from the established money-side might plunge successful platform leaders into innovator's dilemma.

This study investigates why the Japanese mobile phone industry fell into the Galapagos syndrome. It focuses on competition between business ecosystems in the global mobile phone industry from 2001 to 2007, when third-generation mobile phones were released. More concretely, by exploring the relationships between mobile phone manufacturers, network operators, distributors, content providers, and users, this study examines how structural differences in business ecosystems formed in the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) group and the Japanese mobile phone industry, and how they influenced the subsequent disparate technological trajectories through competition between business ecosystems.