About the talk

Kicking off SPRIE's seminar series on the emerging environment for entrepreneurship in Japan, this presentation will focus on the changing pattern of venture capital (VC) investments there. Michael Korver will address issues related to venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan in the context of the experiences of Global Venture Capital and its partners during the last twelve years.

Recently, Japan has seen a rapid evolution of financing for new firms, including rapid changes to its VC industry. Mr. Korver's firm is in the vanguard of that evolution. He will discuss aspects of Japanese VC companies from their earliest inception to the latest trends--from bank subsidiaries to independent funds--and he will share his observations about entrepreneurial startups in Japan.

About the speaker

Michael Korver is a co-founding partner of Global Venture Capital (GVC). He was born and raised in Tokyo and first developed his insider's perspective on Asian business from his experience as an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo from 1983 until 1986, and as an international transactions lawyer with Richards & O'Neil in New York and Tokyo from 1987 until 1993.

Since 1993 Korver has worked as an international business consultant, corporate lawyer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Tokyo. He has founded or co-founded several companies and has served on the boards of a number of them. From 1999 until 2002 he was in charge of legal and business affairs at The News Corporation Limited Japan, the Japanese operations of the international media conglomerate. Korver currently serves as professor in the MBA program at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of Hitotsubashi University where he teaches courses in entrepreneurship and venture capital.

Korver received the BA, the MA in Economics and the JD all from the University of California at Berkeley. He is licensed to practice law in the States of New York and California.

"Sunshine" policy, named after one of Aesop's fables, has been the catch phrase of South Korea's appeasement policy toward North Korea to stimulate and restructure the already collapsed North Korean economy and eventually to convert North Korea to a more conciliatory and cooperative state.

After 10 years of shining the sunlight on North Korea, however, evidences that those self-imposed goals have been achieved are rather scarce. This suggests that, from the beginning, the basic premises of Sunshine policy must have been fatally incongruous with the reality: North Korea should not have been portrayed as an innocent traveler leisurely walking down the street. Or, perhaps, the policy toward North Korea should have pursued more serious goals than just stripping a man of his coat.

In this talk, Dr. Park proposes an alternative to the "Sunshine vs North Wind", and discusses the policy implications of his proposal.

For the past 14 years, Dr. Jongkyu Park has worked on various macroeconomic policy issues of Korean economy including economic forecasts, monetary policy, inflation, budget deficit, exchange rate, savings rate, population aging, real estate bubble, and Japan's economic slowdown and revival. He received B.A. in Economics from Seoul National University in Korea, M.S. in Statistics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University.

Gene Park is a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2007-2008. Park is currently working on a book that analyzes how a large government system for mobilizing and allocating financial capital, the Fiscal Investment Loan Program, has influenced budget politics and the internal coalitional dynamics within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

His work has appeared in the journals Governance and Asian Survey, and he co-authored an article for the edited volume, The State after Statism (Harvard University Press). Dr. Park received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Japan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance's Policy Research Institute and Sophia University in Tokyo.

Dr. Park completed his PhD in 2007 in political science at University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a masters degree in city and regional planning from Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College.