A comparative study of a product planning experiment between Thailand and Japan: Why have specific innovations in emerging countries been realized?

In recent years, researchers have been focusing on innovations launched from emerging countries. Former studies have shown that these innovations rooted deeply in not only particular emerging countries markets' needs but also their unique spirits. In order to reveal the differences and investigating the reasons of the “unique” spirits, a comparative experiment has been conducted between Thai and Japanese well-educated university students; after collecting ideas, engineers and marketers from a Japanese manufacture evaluate the ideas, and then the exceptional few ideas are selected in some group discussions by students. Through this experiment, some differences and characteristics in their product ideas and discussion styles were examined. First, differences have been discovered about the contents of product ideas; Thai students set a shorter new product development period, a durability period and proposed more altruistic product ideas than Japanese students. Second, differences have been found about attitudes towards the discussions; Thai students were less sensitive to the evaluations from knowledgeable authorities, were able to change their own ideas more flexibly and possess more self-confidence than Japanese students. This study implies the capability of taking high potential human resources in emerging countries for their unique innovations not generated by only high potential human resources in developed countries.