Industry and state partnership: The historical role of the engineering research associations in Japan

Industry and Innovation, Dec 1998 by Sigurdson, Jon

PRESENTATION

In 1986, Professor Jon Sigurdson, then Director of the Research Policy Institute in Lund, Sweden, published a monograph entitled Industry and State Partnership in Japan: The Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI) Project. Amazingly enough, given that the VLSI project had been formed ten years earlier, and had completed its work by 1980, and given the universally acknowledged significance of the project in raising the Japanese semiconductor industry to world competitive heights, this small monograph was one of the first accounts, in English, by a non-Japanese, of the structure and organization of the project and its effects.1 Sigurdson's monograph had the special characteristic of placing the VLSI project in the context of Japan's long experience with collaborative research, utilizing the institutional framework of the Engineering Research Association. It was also informed by lengthy interviews with the project's instigators and leaders, and provides case studies not only of the VLSI project itself, but also of several of the preceding ERA projects, and of the firms that were drawn into the VLSI project and benefited from the experience. Sigurdson utilizes the theoretical notion of "ultrastructure" to describe this Japanese institutional innovation of the ERA, in an attempt to capture the sense of its providing a template or framework for the encouragement of collaborative R&D. This too was one of the first efforts to create a theoretical framework for understanding the success of Japanese technological catch-up efforts.

Professor Sigurdson's text has long been out of print, and is available only to a handful of scholars who received copies and in a handful of libraries. What follows is an edited version of the original text, leaving out some of the institutional details, particularly of the VLSI project itself, which are now available from numerous sources, but retaining the organizational analysis of the ERA framework and the lively presentation of the people involved in the projects and their perspectives.

John A. Mathews

Australia-Asia Management Centre, ANU, Canberra

June 1998

PRESENTATION BY JON SIGURDSON (1998)

My research project on the Engineering Research Associations (ERAs) was conceived in the early 1980s, just after Professor Chalmers Johnson had published his pathbreaking work, MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Japan's efforts to catch up with the West were coming to fruition, and the country was emerging as a technological superpower and was in all aspects the dominant technological and industrial power in Asia Pacific. The ERAs appeared to be an intriguing but under-studied aspect of Japan's developmental state institutional arrangements.

Already in Sweden I had realized the significance of technological partnerships between Japanese companies and government agencies. During an exploratory trip in 1982, I met with some of the officials of some projects organized under the auspices of the Next Generation Basic Technologies Project (Jisedai). Then in the summer of 1983 I became a guest researcher at the Graduate School of Saitama University where Professor Toru Yoshimura had attracted a number of prominent scholars in political science and technology management. The latter included Professors Fumio Kodama and Taizo Yakushiji.

The Graduate School maintained close relations with MITI; mid-career officers were on long-term assignment in classes and one MITI official was a member of the faculty. This greatly facilitated access to MITI bureaux and laboratories. The breakthrough to developing a research project on the ERAs came from an introduction by Professor Kodama to one of his earlier informants within the Toshiba Corporation. This man introduced me to the extensive network that had developed among companies arising from the VLSI project, which had run from 1976 to 1979.

The mapping of such networks for the VLSI Project and other ERAs became the main focus of my project, aside from tracing the early development of ERAs and their evolution, in terms of organization and outcomes. Tarui, leader of the VLSI project, was at the time overexposed but many others were very eager to give their time and insights, although my faulty knowledge of Japanese set certain limits on my understanding. They exposed me to the informal structures in industrial Japan and substantially modified my view on the role of MITI and its ability to guide Japan's technological development.

Japan at the time had basically completed its technological catch-up phase. The consequences for government policy makers and for managers of corporate strategies were not altogether clear although companies were reacting more quickly to market developments. With the knowledge of hindsight it would have been more rewarding and more challenging to try to grasp the essence of this shift. The need for a transformation of technology policies is apparent in my attempt to assess the success and failures of ERAs. When looking back on my research in Japan in 1983-85 I feel content to have discovered important aspects of industry-state partnerships and the creation of networks. I was fortunate in my timing in that these networks subsequently were taken up as a model around the world.