The Business Reinvention of Japan and Economic Security in Asia

The Moynihan Institute’s East Asia Program presents Ulrike Schaede, professor of Japanese business and director, Japan Forum for Innovation and Technology, UC San Diego.

Over the past two decades, Japan’s leading companies have a launched a reinvention of their business strategies and internal management and innovation processes. This has enabled them to build high global market shares in several hundred critical, upstream inputs into global supply chains. Some of these advanced materials and components anchor Northeast Asian supply chains. 

There are also several steps in semiconductor manufacturing where advanced technologies from Japan are essential. This presentation will explain this transformation of Japan’s role in global business, and then discuss what the resulting dependencies mean for the potential of the reorganization and decoupling of global supply chains. Political discussions of economic security should include considerations of the growing business dependencies within Asia.

Schaede is professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego, School of Global Policy and Strategy. She is the director of JFIT (Japan Forum for Innovation and Technology) where she organizes a regular “Japan Zoominar” on current issues on Japan. She works on Japan’s changing corporate strategies and management, including business culture, employment practices, financial markets, and manufacturing and innovation under the digital transformation.

She has written extensively on Japanese business organization, including “The Business Reinvention of Japan: How to Make Sense of the New Japan” (Stanford University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and has been translated into Japanese as “Saikō THE KAISHA.” She holds a Ph.D. in Japan studies and economics from Marburg University, Germany.