Research Presentations (session 5 of 5) -Lim, Ohta and Prasad

In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Jaigeun Lim, Seoul Metropolitan Government, "A Study on the Influential Factors on Inbound Foreign Direct Investment and its Implications"

The global importance of Inbound Foreign Direct Investment (IFDI) continues to grow and each nation has made an effort to enhance its national competitiveness through IFDI.  Lim’s research targets 51 nations and 14  candidate variables to learn which factors have an influence on IFDI.

Statistically meaningful variables on IFDI include GDP, economic growth rate, dependency to trade, management of cities, small and medium-sized enterprises’ efficiency and investment incentive policy.  Particularly, the results from Outbound Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI)-oriented nations give evidence that influences of GDP, small and medium-sized enterprises’ efficiency and investment incentive policy are positive to IFDI.  However, Korea shows the lower level of performances in small and medium-sized enterprises’ efficiency and investment incentive policy.  Korea has also shown the lower performances in similar variables compared with other Asia-Pacific nations.  Lim’s research aims to find out what these results mean in terms of policy for Korea?

Ryuichi Ohta, Japan Patent Office, "Relationship Between Technical Standard and Patents"

Samsung and Apple have more than 50 cases of appeals to the courts against each other in more than 10 countries.  In these court battles, Samsung asserted injunction using essential patent which is related to telecommunication standards and committed RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) commitment.  Injunction is one of the basic rights for patent, which means Samsung can assert this right.  However in this case, can Samsung assert injunction in spite of RAND commitment?  In normal circumstances, standard organizations require RAND licensing obligations for essential patents.  Ohta will address the question "Why do they require it and why do they consider these obligations are reasonable for essential patents?" through case studies.

Rajeev Prasad, Reliance Life Sciences, "Concept of Total Quality Management in Pharmaceutical Industries"

The pharmaceutical industry is profoundly regulated and the reasons are obvious;  the use of ineffective, poor quality, harmful medicines can result in therapeutic failure, exacerbation of disease, and resistance of medicines and sometimes death of the patients.  Also, the mistakes in product design or production can have severe, even fatal, consequences for patients which sometimes lead to recall of drugs from the market.  Total Quality Management (TQM) acts as an umbrella under which everyone in the organization can strive for customer satisfaction by producing better quality of product, reduce cost and wastage and increase the efficiency of services.  In his research, Rajeev has focused on the failures of TQM principles by evaluating the warning letters, case studies of pharmaceutical manufacturers and product recalls and also outlined about the implementation of robust quality management system by amalgamation of principles of TQM and pharmaceutical regulatory guidelines.