Shigemi Yoneyama

Paternalistic Leadership in Four East Asian Societies Generalizability and Cultural Differences of the Triad Model

Paternalistic leadership has been claimed to be one dominant leadership style in Asia. However, research failed to assess its comparability and applicability across East Asian contexts. The triad model of paternalistic leadership entails elements of authoritarian, benevolent, and moral character leadership. This article investigates the triad model of paternalistic leadership in mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Paternalistic leadership occurs in an equivalent three-factorial structure indicating the applicability of the triad model, whereas some of the item intercepts vary between the four East Asian employee samples. These findings indicate generalizability of the meaning attributed to paternalistic leadership via three components, whereas the different measurement intercepts epitomize culture-specific scales across the four Asian contexts. The assessment of weak and strong measurement invariance is essential for an emerging cross-cultural research on paternalistic leadership by establishing evidence for the applicability and generalizability (including their boundaries) across cultural contexts.

Networked path towards technology innovation: the case of Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company

This paper deals with why flexible networks can be efficient in responding to rapidly changing consumer demands, developing new technologies, and disseminating information regarding commercialisation. Taiwanese small firms, along with their Italian counterparts, have often been cited as paradigmatic cases of demand-responsive network structures. In the semiconductor sector of Taiwan, the government research institutes and their policy networks with the private sector investors substantially cleared the hurdles of uncertainty regarding the initial investment decisions of R&D. Simultaneously, international networks that exploited the richness of structural holes facilitated smooth and speedy transfers of new technologies. This paper finds that technological innovation within a small firm network cannot be successful without the establishment of a domestic policy network and an international supply network.

Knowledge integration capabilities of Japanese companies: reconstructing intra-firm networks for technology commercialisation

Despite aggressive investments in R&D and its success, Japanese companies demonstrate poor results in technology commercialisation. Almost half of all technological patents that Japanese companies hold are dormant, being unused. The purpose of this paper is to explore why technologies become dormant and how firms can overcome the problem to facilitate the process of technology commercialisation. Based upon the questionnaire survey of Japanese manufacturing companies, we find that exposing technology to the public in early stages of the commercialisation process plays an important role in enhancing overall commercialisation performance. Technology is an equivocal and context-dependent entity and changes its meaning from one context to another. Exposing a new piece of technology to the public enables firms to acquire more information about its market potential, which in return propels the commercialisation process more effectively. This research also implies that an early market exposure of new technological innovation contributes to building an effective inter-firm R&D network.

INTERNAL EMBEDDEDNESS AND INNOVATION PERFORMANCE OF OVERSEAS R&D BASE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of internal embeddedness of overseas R&D base, or the relationship with its parent company, on innovation performance of the base. While existing studies that examined the internal embeddedness have paid most attention to control–autonomy dimension, this paper takes into consideration the factors of information, human, and capital interaction between the base and the parent. Through such multi-faceted investigation, we found that the bases with weaker control by parent and stronger information linkage with parent demonstrated higher performance. Moreover, the research result revealed that the human interaction, e.g., the transfer of R&D manager from parent, had a pivotal roles affecting the degree of both control and information linkage. With these findings, it was argued that to balance dependency and independency in the base–parent relationship and to design appropriate human interactions for realising it would be important management issues in global R&D.

BUILDING EXTERNAL NETWORKS AND ITS EFFECT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF OVERSEAS R&D BASE

This paper examines the relationship between R&D collaborations with local organizations in the host countries and the performance of overseas R&D bases, considering the types of collaborations. The result of an empirical analysis shows that, while collaborations with local companies in the same industry of the host country just enhance the efficiency of R&D activities, those with local universities, public research institutions, and companies in the different industries increase the overall R&D performance including the efficiency of R&D activities and the quality of technological outputs. Also, as a factor that enables companies to build external networks, the effect of the nationality of top manager and researchers of R&D bases is investigated. The result demonstrates that R&D bases with top managers from the home countries are less active in developing R&D collaborations with local universities and that, as the percentage of the researchers from the home countries increases, the R&D bases tend to develop R&D collaborations with local companies in the same industry, but they do not develop those with local universities and other research institutions.

Marketing of technological knowledge: an empirical analysis of licensing activities of university TLOs in Japan

Technology licensing can be interpreted as a marketing activity. Many companies as well as university technology licensing organisations (TLOs) that pursue profit from technological assets recognise the significance of the marketing perspective on technology licensing. However, not all the companies and TLOs are able to achieve a satisfactory performance in their activities. This is mainly because the marketing of technology needs a different approach from those of the marketing of consumer goods, service goods and industrial goods. Technology as knowledge is invisible and highly uncertain in the process of value realisation, and this requires idiosyncratic marketing approaches. In this paper, we address the nature of technology marketing in comparison with the marketing of other goods and discuss key factors of success for higher licensing performance based on a questionnaire survey and the case analysis of TLOs in Japan. We will further discuss the difference in approaches depending on the type of technology.

National R&D Investments in Korea

This chapter offers an empirical investigation of how decisions regarding national R&D investments are made in Korea. We are interested in locating structural problems within the Korean NIS in the face of globalization and mad technologies through a system of dynamic simulation and modeling. In so doing, we intend to devise ways of ameliorating problems within the NIS investment decision-making process by providing policy implications. Korea offers an interesting testing ground for a system of dynamic modeling because of the drastic changes in the NIS sector which have occurred as a result of rapid economic development and its combative response to the threat of mad technologies.

Prospects for East Asian Economic Governance

The previous chapter discussed how large corporations in Korea are defending their technological advantage from external threats, including mad technologies, by reinforcing transactional governance through a policy of constant organizational innovation. In our case study chapters, we discovered that the private sectors in Japan and Taiwan are also strengthening their capacities to undertake technological and organizational innovations in order to fight back against mad technologies. All of this indicates that macroeconomic governance by the public sector is weakened to the extent that it no longer seems to be able to regulate global economic contingencies, as the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s clearly indicated.

The Semiconductor Industry in Taiwan

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry was the result of carefully orchestrated long-term planning by the government and private firms. It offers an evident example of how the interplay of domestic policy and international supply networks can fend off the encroachment of mad technologies. However, this statement poses three questions that warrant attention from network theorists. First, do small firm networks, such as the family firm networks that exist in Taiwan, despite their limited financial reserves, have hidden network resources that can support risky diversification into semiconductor industries? Secondly, do small firm networks, with severely restricted marketing capabilities, have other network resources that encourage the commercialization of new technologies? Thirdly, if the network resources of Taiwanese family firms have overcome the above two difficulties in innovation and technology commercialization, what are the unique organizational advantages that have made their success possible?

Why Governance Reforms are Not Effective

In the previous chapters, we discussed how large firms in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have been defending their technological advantages in an age of globalization and mad technology. We noticed that the NIS structures in these three countries were becoming increasingly alike and that Korean and Taiwanese firms are quickly changing their R&D strategies by adopting some of the main features of mad technologies. Korean firms were particularly effective in obtaining knowledge integration skills for new technologies (i.e., commercialization), while Taiwanese firms had proven remarkably successful in organizing international networks of specialized and reciprocal division of labor. Japanese firms were found to be very efficient in knowledge patenting, although they were slow to adopt quick knowledge integration skills.