The Business Reinvention of Japan – Why it Matters for Global Business and Politics

Over the past 20 years, Japan’s leading companies have seen their former competitiveness in the mass-manufacturing of high-quality consumer products competed away, first by Korea and Taiwan, and then China. A complete pivot has become necessary to compete not through size and output volume of consumer gadgets, but nimble specialization and technology leadership in input components. The goal is to anchor Asian supply chains and stay ahead of China by occupying critical deep-tech niches. As Japanese companies have gone on a refocusing diet, they have attracted foreign capital and reorganized internal processes of innovation. This conversation laid out these changes and showed why we should pay attention to what they mean for global business and politics.

Speaker Bio:

Ulrike Schaede is Professor of Japanese Business at the University of California, San Diego, School of Global Policy and Strategy. She is the Director of JFIT (Japan Forum for Innovation and Technology) where she organizes a weekly “Japan Zoominar” on current issues on Japan. Schaede works on Japan’s changing corporate strategies, including business culture, change management, employment practices, the rise of private equity, corporate governance, and manufacturing and innovation under the digital transformation. She has written extensively on Japanese business organization, and is the author of The Business Reinvention of Japan: How to Make Sense of the New Japan (Stanford University Press, 2020) as well as Choose and Focus: Japanese Business Strategies for the 21st Century (Cornell UP, 2008). She holds a PhD in Japan Studies and Economics from Marburg University, Germany, and has been invited to visiting professor and scholar positions at UC Berkeley, Harvard Business School, Stanford University in the U.S., as well as Hitotsubashi University and the research institutes of The Bank of Japan, various Ministries, and the Development Bank of Japan. All told, Schaede has spent over nine years of research in Tokyo and is an advisor to two start-up incubators in Japan.