Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

400 G. Trauffler and H. Tschirky
The implementation plan at Nitta exactly described which meetings were necessary
and when they were to take place. It also fixed responsibilities, the decisions
to be taken, the participating employees; the information needed in order to
take decisions as well how to document the information elaborated during the
meetings and finally it fixed the frequency of the meetings. The customization of
the process could be done by once running through the implementation plan in a
scheduled calendar year and by adapting and changing activities, tasks, responsibilities
and agendas of the meeting in order to best fit to the needs of Nitta. At the
end of the strategic planning process, strategic project descriptions are formulated
and ready to be started.
Summary and Conclusion
This article describes as a progress report how basic technology and innovation
management concepts were introduced and implemented at the Japanese company
Nitta in the course of an academic consulting project. The particularity of the project
was that Nitta previously did not have any MoT concepts in place. However
this particularity increased the freedom of choice about what MoT concepts to implement,
and in which way. It increased at the same time the complexity involved
in how to proceed at all in a very basic sense. From the experience obtained in this
particular project, the authors deduced on the one hand, a generalized implementation
procedure in five steps that should be taken as minimal guidelines for developing
and implementing MoT concepts in companies that are not at all familiar
with MoT and on the other hand overall lessons learned.
The guidelines:
� Create transparency and reduce complexity. These two tasks consist of classifying
the knowledge assets of the company – assets related to scientific, technological
and market knowledge - into structures that allows their purpose and use
to be understood, and interrelated in an overall company context. In the project
described in this paper the innovation architecture by Sauber (2004) was used.
� Structure the core technological assets of the company along the company’s
markets and build a technology driven business structure. One major goal of
MoT is to leverage technological assets strategically in order to build up new
competitive advantage or to extend existing competitive advantage; the technologies’
impact on the businesses of the company should be known and actively
be used. In this project technology impact analysis was applied in order
to visualize and optimize the alignment of (core) technologies for business purposes.
� Elaborate a procedure that allows technological self-renewal and that fosters
innovation. Taking the technology driven business structure as a base, the company
should now be able to systematically follow technology change by keeping
its portfolio of technologies updated and systematically deploying technologies
in order to generate innovations. For this purpose the academic