Huasheng Zheng is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20.
Takafumi Ochiai is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20. Ochiai has over 9 years of experience as an engineer at The Asahi Shimbun, the national leading newspaper company in Japan. At The Asahi Shimbun, he engaged in R&D about artificial intelligence, launches of new media services, and development of a data analytics system. While at Shorenstein APARC, his research will focus on data science, data-based decision making, and organizational change.
Shintaro Nishihara is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20. Nishihara has experience and knowledge working in information technology, project management and the retail industry. Currently, he is a director at Future Architect, an IT consulting service in Japan, where his most recent project optimized logistics and improved ordering accuracy using artificial intelligence. He graduated from Kyoto University in Japan with a BS in Integrated Human Studies.
Dr. Makoto Kanemaru is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20. Kanemaru works as an electronic manufacturer for the research and development department at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan. He is a researcher in preventive maintenance engineering for industrial motor and renewable energy systems. He received his PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2011. During his fellowship at Shorenstein APARC, his research will focus on trends and future of IoT and open innovation in manufacturing technologies of electrical equipment.
Yongmin (Terry) Hu is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20. Hu is a co-founder and co-president of FountainVest Partners, a China focused private equity fund with asset under management of approximately US$5 billion. Prior to co-founding FountainVest in 2007, he was a Managing Director at Temasek Holdings as well as a member of Temasek's global investment committee and head of its real estate investment. Previously, Hu was a investment banker with Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns in Hong Kong and Shanghai for over 10 years. Hu graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai with a Bachelor of Art Degree in English Language and Literature.
Singapore in Southeast Asia and Stanford University in the United States are focal points for discussions of AI and how it can be made to help—not hurt—human beings. In a piece written for RSIS Commentaries, Don Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at APARC, uses a recent panel at Stanford to illustrate the difficulty and necessity of bringing both generalist and specialist perspectives to bear on the problem.
Singapore has been described as “a thriving hub for artificial intelligence.” In May 2019, Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) released the first edition of “A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework.”
That “accountability-based” document would “frame the discussions around harnessing AI in a responsible way” by “translat[ing] ethical principles into practical measures that can be implemented by organisations deploying AI solutions”. The guiding principles it proposes to operationalise are that AI systems should be “human-centric” and that decisions made by using them should be “explainable, transparent, and fair”….
Read the full article on RSiS Commentaries.
The Bay Area Council Economic Institute and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Japan Program invite you to a forum on the critical transformations underway in Japan’s economy and the unique synergies that connect it to the Bay Area. The program will include a discussion of the high-level findings of a new report by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute on Japan’s economic engagement in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Bay Area, and the role the region is playing as California and Japan look to expand trade and investment and accelerate innovation. Leading experts and practitioners from both Japan and the Bay Area will join us for this discussion.
1:00pm Welcome
Jim Wunderman, President & CEO, Bay Area Council
Hon. Tomochika Uyama, Consul General of Japan
Takeo Hoshi, Director, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program
1:10pm Introduction of Bay Area Council Economic Institute Report: High-Level Findings
Sean Randolph, Senior Director, Bay Area Council Economic Institute
1:30pm Observations and Silicon Valley Overview
Kenji Kushida, Research Scholar, Stanford University
1:45pm Panel 1: The Emerging New Japan
Kanetaka Maki, Associate Professor, Waseda Business School
Mio Takaoka, CFO, Medical Note and Partner, Arbor Ventures
Takeshi Ebihara, Founding GP, Rebright Partners
Emre Yuasa, Principal, Globis Capital Partners
Sean Randolph, Senior Director, Bay Area Council Economic Institute (Moderator)
2:45pm Panel 2: Japanese Companies in Silicon Valley Creating Value in New Ways
Hiroshi Menjo, Managing Partner, Net Service Ventures
Tsunehiko Yanagihara, Executive VP, Mitsubishi Corp M-LAB
Gen Isayama, General Partner & CEO, World Innovation Lab
Dennis Clark, Managing Director, Honda Innovations
George Saikalis, SVP & CTO, Hitachi America, Ltd.
Kenji Kushida, Research Scholar, Stanford University (Moderator)
4:00pm Closing Remarks
Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall
616 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
This is part 2 of a talk presenting how innovative large Japanese companies are harnessing Silicon Valley. It is a review of the fireside chats and panels presented at the Silicon Valley – New Japan Summit last November at Stanford, which was in Japanese. The talk adds some historical context, and introduces through many of the company cases from the summit, including Panasonic, Fuji Film, Itochu, Rakuten, Obayashi, Nomura Holdings, Sourcenext, Komatsu, SMBC, and Toyota Research Institute.
The current surge of large Japanese companies into Silicon Valley is focused on firms aiming to identify new opportunities to collaborate with the startup ecosystem in order to understand future technological and industry trajectories, to facilitate new forms of “open” innovation within the company, and in some cases to even redefine how to add value to their core offerings. However, given a vast differently economic context from their core operations in Japan, many of the large Japanese firms’ initial forays tend to fall into patterns of “worst practices” that are ineffective. Yet, a small but growing number of innovative Japanese companies are producing novel and valuable collaborations with a variety of Silicon Valley firms, investors, and ecosystem players. The talk will survey a range of strategic options available to Japanese companies, with implications for how to better adapt companies from Japan to Silicon Valley, and more broadly from different political economic systems.
Kenji Kushida, Research Scholar, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program and Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project Leader
Kenji E. Kushida is the Japan Program Research Scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University (APARC), Project Leader of the Stanford Silicon Valley – New Japan Project (Stanford SV-NJ), research affiliate of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE), International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies (CIGS), and Visiting Researcher at National Institute for Research Advancement (NIRA). He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.
Kushida’s research streams include 1) Information Technology innovation, 2) Silicon Valley’s economic ecosystem, 3) Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s, and 4) the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startups Ecosystem,” “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).
He has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR.
He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, a fellow of the US-Japan Leadership Program, an alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future.
4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking
Register to attend at http://www.stanford-svnj.org/12819
Shorenstein APARC's annual overview for academic year 2017-18 is now available.
Download it for information on the wide variety of Center research from the the past academic year, Shorenstein APARC's educational activities, and major Center events like the Shorenstein Journalism Award.
This paper examines the relationship between modern management practices and the demand for different occupational skills utilizing a unique context in South Korea after the Asian financial crisis. Management practices in South Korea had traditionally emphasized the organizational harmony over individual performance, and firm growth over short-term profits. However, as South Korea opened up to foreign firms after the financial crisis, domestic firms started to adopt western or more "modern" management practices. Using the industry level variation in management practices generated by the average industry management index of five advanced economies (the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy), Lee finds that modern management increases the demand for technical skill. Moreover, modern management practices help achieve various organizational changes that utilize information technology. He also finds that performance measured as the return on asset increases with modern management practices, and document the complementarity between modern management practices and technical workers in increasing the return on assets. In short, this paper finds that modern management practices may increase the earnings difference between skilled - in particular, technically skilled - and unskilled workers.
