If film-making helps shine a window on a nation’s concerns and outlook then taking a long flight back from Japan and its inaugural corporate venturing meeting is a good way to catch up with the memes at issue in its society. While there is not much that initially seems to connect Go Masao, After the Rain and Kamikaze Girls, they all ask why people do what they do and emphasise having the confidence to follow one’s own path rather than obey others.
As Tayo says to her ronin husband, Ihei Misawa, in After the Rain: “It is not what you do but why you do it that is important.”
Or as a corporate venturing head at the Japan Venture Capital Association (JVCA) event hosted by the UK embassy in Tokyo said of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem:
“The Silicon Valley model is not necessarily transferable to Japan. We need to find our path.”
Part of Japan’s path is to keep new businesses alive far longer than in the US. Whereas nearly half of US start-ups close within three years of funding, in Japan more than 90% are still alive and die only gradually beyond that, according to data from the Teikoku Data Bank and the US census. In avoiding allegations of making a mistake by shutting down a launch company, there is a slower recycling of assets and greater attention paid to what is being funded.
In the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report’s annual survey, 9.5% of respondents’ weighted average replies said Japan had “insufficient capacity to innovate”. The country was brought down in the ranking, to fifth out of 144, due to relatively poor government procurement of advanced technology and lack of university-industry collaboration in
research and development (R&D) even though Japan spends about one percentage point more than the US on R&D.
But Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) is attempting to help entrepreneurs with planned policies to encourage corporations to buy more local venture-backed companies, especially as trade sales have outnumbered flotations since 2008, and develop their incubation and open innovation and corporate venturing programmes.
The policies follow an excellent report to the leaders of the US-Japan Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council (see box below) that identifies the record number of corporate venturing fund launches last year – a trend that has continued this year with NTT Docomo’s $125m fund – and their outperformance when compared with independent venture capital firms.
Corporate venturing units, which make up 13% of the total number of venture investors according to Meti, are
increasingly active both in Japan and overseas, where the JVCA says its members invested more outside the country than internally for the first time last year.
Research by Kou Yukawa at technology company Fujitsu, presented to a seminar at Hitotsubashi University,
found 15 of the 30 to 40 largest information and communication technology companies were responsible for
¥15.2bn ($190m) of venture investments, while small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector invested ¥19.4bn.
Local venture capital firms and entrepreneurs, however, bemoan the relative difficulty of investing alongside
some traditional corporations due to their perceived bureaucratic mindset and unwillingness to consider ideas
“not invented here”.
They were more optimistic about the corporate venturing units where the entrepreneurial founders, such as at
Softbank, Gree, Mixi, Dwango, Kakaku and DeNA,were still leading the parent companies. But outside Japan, the reputation of corporate venturing units both from new and established companies in syndicates is highly regarded. Last year we wrote a case study looking at how Japan-based pharmaceutical company Takeda used its Silicon Valley-based corporate venturing unit to invest in UK-based Heptares Therapeutics, and how Takeda was able to identify the leading-edge research underpinning Heptares, stemming from the field that won last year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry
– drugs against G-protein-coupled receptors – and join the consortium of top tier venture investors as a strategic partner.
A form of local venturing, therefore, is emerging – what Moburo Matsuki, managing partner at MKS Partners, called Japanese adventuring – that augurs well for the country and its economy.
Still, false dawns have been seen before. Zenichi Shishido, professor of law at Hitotsubashi University, said
he had been studying venture capital for 30 years and for the past decade “I have been saying it is just before dawn”. Are we seeing the real dawn now, he asked?