Japan’s public broadcaster NHK airs a program called Project X. Each episode tells the story of people who joined forces to develop a new technology or build something remarkable—a massive dam, the QR Code, a lunar exploration robot (tiny ones), and many others. One of the pleasures of the program is that the people who actually did the work return ten or twenty years later to look back on what they accomplished.
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Watching these stories, I often find myself thinking how misleading the usual stereotypes about the Japanese really are. We are often described as lacking originality or as being too group-oriented. Yet the people featured on the program are anything but ordinary conformists. Time after time, they show remarkable creativity, perseverance, honesty, and dedication. Sometimes I cannot help wondering whether Japan simply has a larger share of such people than many other countries.
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There is, however, one striking characteristic. Almost all of these innovators worked inside large corporations. They were essentially entrusted with what might be called “startups within established companies.” This is quite different from the Silicon Valley model—at least the popular image of it—in which independent entrepreneurs come together, form an ad hoc team, develop a product, sell the company, and then move on to create another one. (In reality, Silicon Valley today is probably much more complicated than that old myth.)
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But perhaps Japan’s way is perfectly valid in its own right. People often say that Japan has too few startups. That is true if one counts only independent new companies. Yet Japan has long had another model: the in-house venture. Large corporations remain strong, and lifetime employment has traditionally provided the foundation. Income tends to be more evenly distributed, but for people who want a stable life over the long term, that may be a worthwhile trade-off. (To be fair, genuinely independent startups have also become much more common in recent years.)
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Another thing that stands out is the kind of innovation these stories involve. Almost all of them concern “engineering”, that is something built with their hands and minds. We Japanese love craftsmanship, patiently refining and perfecting technology until it reaches an extraordinary level. The QR Code may seem like something that could have been invented with brainpower alone, but it appears that relentless improvement, persistence, and sheer determination were just as important in turning it into a global success.
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