Although Prime Minister Shinzo Abe target is to get Japan's Economy out of deflation and stagnation
through monetary easing,buying time and afterwads making a fiscal reform , to reach a fiscal consolidation.
All governments have limited capacity to make significant change, so - as in business and indeed life in general it is essential to choose and focus.
Much of the Japanese elite want to transform the country into a national version of "industrial Internet" General Electric, and are moving to implement those aims. But Abe could derail these efforts with his divisive and dangerous constitutional and historical obsessions.
As we know from markets for mobile devices and the incredible resurrection of Apple,Information and Computer Technology (ICT) is an area where it pays to be competitive through innovation. Moreover, ICT competitiveness appears likely to pay off very well indeed over the coming years and decades. One crucial reason is that ICT sensors and data processing are becoming increasingly cheap, as described in a concise June 2013 overview by McKinsey and Company.
For energy, this reduction in the costs of gathering, transmitting, and processing information on such system parameters as temperature, vibration, and the like have led to significant efficiency and reliability gains in jet engines, wind turbines, locomotives and other systems. Those results mean large savings by customers, and a great deal of money earned by vendors who innovate disruptive business models. Setting aside the good news for sustainability, that bottom-line fact is one reason General Electric (GE) announced, very publicly on June 18, that it was going to be an "industrial Internet" firm as much as a maker of things.
ICT is a huge opportunity, but despite its technological strengths, Japan has to run hard to catch up to the leaders. Perhaps the most astute observer of Japan's ICT policy and its political economy aspects is Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley.
Vogel also lists a number of factors that hinder Japanese firms in the ICT sector. These can perhaps be best summed up as an institutionalized lack of flexibility in the face of an economic environment that is increasingly interactive (indeed, "user-driven") and global. But at the same time, he notes that Japan still possesses core strengths in its "capable bureaucracy, strong government-industry ties, and close collaboration among firms, suppliers, banks, and workers".
ICT is very realistically depicted as a means for reducing a range of costs while at the same time opening up opportunities. For example, the LDP Commission's ICT report very sensibly calls for putting "ICT in concrete" as well as diffusing the renewable and smart model being developed in the devastated Tohoku (Northeast) region across the nation.
Japan's ICT industry in 2010 was worth 85.4 trillion yen worth of a total 928.9 trillion yen in nominal market size. In other words, the ICT industry represented 9.2% of the economy, making it much larger than construction, iron and steel, and other sectors. Yet the ICT sector as a whole has not increased markedly from its 1995 level of just over 78 trillion yen, in step with an economy that has not grown significantly since the mid-1990s.
Japanese manufacturing as a whole as well as in several core business sectors is notably behind that of the Germans and the Americans.
Japan is gifted with very fast and cheap broadband, but has not diffused it to the extent that the Americans and the Germans have. It therefore has an opportunity to undertake very productive investment and at the same time innovate new technologies and business models.
The Ministry of Interior and Communications (MIC), in cooperation with other agencies that have significant presence in local areas, is eagerly supportive of an ICT-centered growth strategy.
Japan is, in short, undertaking promising investment in smart and green sectors against a backdrop of accelerating opportunity. Japan is also guided by many of the "resilience" concerns that are emerging as concerns in virtually every country.
Abe is certainly not going to interfere in the MIC and other ministries' ICT budgets and their allied smart city, smart grid, distributed generation and other projects. He in fact sits on committees related to these initiatives. Abe is perhaps unlikely to spearhead these ICT endeavors.
By Andrew Dewitt
Asian Times
through monetary easing,buying time and afterwads making a fiscal reform , to reach a fiscal consolidation.
All governments have limited capacity to make significant change, so - as in business and indeed life in general it is essential to choose and focus.
Much of the Japanese elite want to transform the country into a national version of "industrial Internet" General Electric, and are moving to implement those aims. But Abe could derail these efforts with his divisive and dangerous constitutional and historical obsessions.
As we know from markets for mobile devices and the incredible resurrection of Apple,Information and Computer Technology (ICT) is an area where it pays to be competitive through innovation. Moreover, ICT competitiveness appears likely to pay off very well indeed over the coming years and decades. One crucial reason is that ICT sensors and data processing are becoming increasingly cheap, as described in a concise June 2013 overview by McKinsey and Company.
For energy, this reduction in the costs of gathering, transmitting, and processing information on such system parameters as temperature, vibration, and the like have led to significant efficiency and reliability gains in jet engines, wind turbines, locomotives and other systems. Those results mean large savings by customers, and a great deal of money earned by vendors who innovate disruptive business models. Setting aside the good news for sustainability, that bottom-line fact is one reason General Electric (GE) announced, very publicly on June 18, that it was going to be an "industrial Internet" firm as much as a maker of things.
ICT is a huge opportunity, but despite its technological strengths, Japan has to run hard to catch up to the leaders. Perhaps the most astute observer of Japan's ICT policy and its political economy aspects is Steven Vogel, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley.
Vogel also lists a number of factors that hinder Japanese firms in the ICT sector. These can perhaps be best summed up as an institutionalized lack of flexibility in the face of an economic environment that is increasingly interactive (indeed, "user-driven") and global. But at the same time, he notes that Japan still possesses core strengths in its "capable bureaucracy, strong government-industry ties, and close collaboration among firms, suppliers, banks, and workers".
ICT is very realistically depicted as a means for reducing a range of costs while at the same time opening up opportunities. For example, the LDP Commission's ICT report very sensibly calls for putting "ICT in concrete" as well as diffusing the renewable and smart model being developed in the devastated Tohoku (Northeast) region across the nation.
Japan's ICT industry in 2010 was worth 85.4 trillion yen worth of a total 928.9 trillion yen in nominal market size. In other words, the ICT industry represented 9.2% of the economy, making it much larger than construction, iron and steel, and other sectors. Yet the ICT sector as a whole has not increased markedly from its 1995 level of just over 78 trillion yen, in step with an economy that has not grown significantly since the mid-1990s.
Japanese manufacturing as a whole as well as in several core business sectors is notably behind that of the Germans and the Americans.
Japan is gifted with very fast and cheap broadband, but has not diffused it to the extent that the Americans and the Germans have. It therefore has an opportunity to undertake very productive investment and at the same time innovate new technologies and business models.
The Ministry of Interior and Communications (MIC), in cooperation with other agencies that have significant presence in local areas, is eagerly supportive of an ICT-centered growth strategy.
Japan is, in short, undertaking promising investment in smart and green sectors against a backdrop of accelerating opportunity. Japan is also guided by many of the "resilience" concerns that are emerging as concerns in virtually every country.
Abe is certainly not going to interfere in the MIC and other ministries' ICT budgets and their allied smart city, smart grid, distributed generation and other projects. He in fact sits on committees related to these initiatives. Abe is perhaps unlikely to spearhead these ICT endeavors.
By Andrew Dewitt
Asian Times
