A study on R&D organization management of Japanese ICT companies using patent information

Due to the collapse of the bubble economy, many Japanese ICT companies are faced with a tough situation. Each company has implemented various management reforms to restore competitive advantage. However, such attempts were unsuccessful. Although they have large shares in the domestic market, despite struggle against China and Korean companies they have smaller share compared to these two countries in the global market. It seems that their personnel tended to give structural inertia and resistance that hindered the construction of new core capabilities to respond to environmental change, because they conducted sustainable development using existing core personnel. In addition, there are some reports that the companies have experienced silo effects because they have lost inter-department communication under the circumstances of vertical division organization. In this research, we compare the differences between technology development organization of Japanese and foreign ICT companies using patent information. Furthermore, core rigidity and silo effect degree are calculated by using centrality and classification on social network analysis. As a result, Japanese ICT companies are confirmed that the core rigidity degree of the companies is around 1.5 times higher than foreign company and silo effect degree on their R&D organization is high.