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Dear AIB members,
The Japan Academy of Multinational Enterprises is delighted to announce that Volume 4 (2017), Issue 1 of Japan MNE Insights is now available online (http://www.mne-jp.org/english
This issue includes two special essays written by Yasuro Uchida and Akio Tokuda, and here are the abstracts.
Essay 1: Yasuro Uchida, “Royalty Free Intellectual Property and Inter-industrialization of MNEs”
Alliances created between companies operating in different industries have been starting to appear. One of the causes of such alliances is the IoT, the “Internet of Things”. Since various things around us are connected to the Internet via the IoT, things which people previously managed separately can now be managed in one system. In other words, the premise of the IoT is cooperation beyond the boundaries of discrete industries. As a result of this, as technology which utilizes IoT develops and increases in popularity, the demand by the users for technology that can make uses of various industries will also increase accordingly. One of the most important things for creating such an alliance is a technology standard. Indeed, the IT Strategic Headquarters of Japan Cabinet Secretariat has decided to promote the IoT policy, emphasizing that the key for IoT policy success is such a technology standard.
This standardization is primarily divided into two types. One is an international standard; for this, cooperation with foreign companies is required. The other is an inter-industrial standard. This one is necessary because the IoT business is based on the alliances created between companies operating in different industries. Therefore, both the international standard and the inter-industrial standard are developed simultaneously. There is a lot of research related to international standardization of technology, but despite that research related to business strategies － which accompanies both the international standard and the inter-industrial standard at the same time －is relatively scarce. The key factor for the success of these two standards is the royalty free status of intellectual property (IP). This essay presented the case of Qualcomm to explain the importance of royalty free IP.
Essay 2:Akio Tokuda, “The Ultimate Source of Competitive Advantages of the Firm”.
In this essay, I firstly developed a framework to identify the ultimate sources of competitive advantage of the firm by invoking and amending the resource based model of strategic management. It clarifies that the ultimate source of it comes not only from the combination of resources with competitive characteristics, such as valuable, inimitable, non-substitutable and rare, but also from the exploitation of factor markets disequilibrium directed by the heterogeneous perception of the entrepreneur. Secondly, to take advantage of the developed framework, I made a definition of ‘strategic alliances’ that alliances are strategic when they are directed by the entrepreneur to adjust differentiation of resources’ value through a unique combination of resources which distributed among the ‘hierarchies’.
We hope that you will find the essays interesting and share them with your colleagues.
With kind regards,
Dr. Tamiko Kasahara
Editorial member of Japan MNE Insights.