学会誌

The purpose of this article is to theorize the concept of "re-founding" of small business implemented by its successor. Since the decline in performance of Japanese firms for the last several decades seems to correspond to the decline of each industry. In other words, it is not enough to simply win the competition within the industry through product or process innovations for long-term survival of family-owned small business. But also this business should transit from the original one to the new type. This is the most significant entrepreneurial activity in family business and it is called re-founding in this article.
In order to develop this concept theoretically we also investigate how the successor of family-owned small business carries out re-founding, focusing on pinpoint business definition which is determined by the combination of "what is the main product that a company sells" and "who is its key customer."
The findings from the exploratory case study show that business structures will be overhauled in the process of re-founding and those changes are organized into four aspects: (1) restructuring of operations in the operational dimension which will provoke conflicts with employees; (2) (re-)organizing of the management layer in the administrative dimension according to organizational growth life cycle; (3) reconstruction of business categories in strategic dimension, including disposition of unprofitable or old businesses; (4) generational change of employees, derived from the nature of invisible assets.
We address a new perspective based on paying attention to fundamental factor of strategic management explicitly to reconsider the extant literature about small- and medium-sized enterprises and family business.

Key words:re-founding, family-owned small business, pinpoint business definition, strategic renewal, overhaul of business structures

According to spreading of the word "open innovation," large enterprises in Japan have come to seen as active to collaborate with other organizations for the purpose of developing new technologies and new products. This may give a good opportunity for us to make use of many SMEs with excellent technologies in Japan, and thereby to increase innovation capacity of Japan as a whole.　However, because the large enterprises do not usually disclose their needs information when they search outside technologies and knowledge, effective matching between the large enterprises and the SMEs that have appropriate technologies for them are hindered. Although this issue does not appear to be a core discussion point in the existing open innovation literature in English, it is actually a big problem for the people engaged in promotion of SMEs and regional industry. The TAMA Association established as an industrial cluster promoting organization have been achieving its performance in the matching activities between large enterprises and SMEs in both forms of non-disclosing and disclosing the needs information of the large enterprises, and its experience give us implications to make a solution for this issue of the negative attitude of the large enterprises to disclose their needs information.

Key words:open innovation, search, disclosure of needs information, industrial cluster, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME)

In this paper, we study the academic entrepreneurship that does not have enough resources and networks to the technology and market in new business creation. Recent years, academic entrepreneur research accumulates knowledge such as academic start-ups, entrepreneurship education at university, and difference of between entrepreneur and academic entrepreneur. But little is known about the academic entrepreneurs' way of thinking and pattern of behavior in such situation. In order to shed light that, we conducted single case study.
Then, this paper shows the following two events. First, we propose a new comprehensive framework which helps to understand academic entrepreneurship. This framework consists of technology network, market network, entrepreneur team, mission, resource, and business theme. We also show relationships among these constituents. Second, we show progress of technology and market networking, then we consider similarity and dissimilarity between networking process and effectuation. Finally, we derive the theoretical implication for academic entrepreneurship and practical implication for entrepreneurship education at university.

Key words:academic entrepreneurship, academic start-ups, effectuation, networking, entrepreneurship education

In recent years, there has been increasing number of studies about user innovation.　These have been making progress in the field of determining users' attributions or discussing the motivation of users' contributiton to innovations. However, few studies have been conducted the relationship between firms and user communities or the management of them in the processes of user innovation. In this study, we focused on solving those problems using a case of developing portable radiation measuring instruments as open source hardware. This study indicates two results. The first is that contents of the messages users send to the community and their timing play an important role in the process of user innovation.The second is that the governing system known as "Benevolent Dictatorship" has also been detected in that community of open source hardware.

Key words:user innovation, open source hardware, innovation community, Benevolent Dictatorship