In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Toshifumi Kadowaki, "The Keys to Successful M&As in High-Tech Industries - Based on a Study of the HP-Compaq Merger"

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are tactics, not strategy.  Successful M&As, however, can be considered one of the most useful tactics in realizing corporate strategy because M&As often save time and can even save money and reduce risk.  Many high-tech companies, therefore, have made a large number of M&As recently.  Numerous empirical studies, though, have shown that most M&As fail. Through the case study of the Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger, Kadowaki analyzes what makes M&As successful and what causes them to fail.

Oshie Sato, "Dawn of a new Era in the Video Industry - Impact of Smart TVs from a Historical Perspective of Broadcasting and Movie Industries in the United States and Japan"

After prospering for more than a half century both in the United States and Japan, the broadcasting and movie industries have reached a turning point of their business models.  This is due mostly to the rise of competition with the Internet since the late 1990s and a global recession led by Lehman's fall in 2008.  What will happen to these industries in the U.S. and Japan over the next decade?  Sato analyzes a future picture of the broadcasting and movie industries, focusing on the impact of smart TVs - next-generation video devices such as Google TV and Apple TV.

Sonya Vasudeva, "Pharmacogenetics in Cancer:  Steps Towards Personalized Medicine"

The variability in clinical response to drug treatment has been well known for decades.  An era of pharmacogenetics started almost fifty years ago when it was recognized that a part of this variation is inherited, and can therefore be predictable.  With the wealth of information readily available online, the promise of personalized medicine looms large, but the generalization into clinical applications of pharmacogenomics has been more challenging.  In Vasudeva's research, she shares examples of tests, which are integrated by USA FDA and EMA into drug lables, one example being K Ras mutation for metastatic colorectal cancer.  Vasudeva argues that the increased availability of such tests may transform the field of medical oncology, moving treatment from the "one size fits all" approach to a personalized therapy based on variations in an individual genome.