About the talk
Japan is at a critical turning point in 2008, with two opposing groups and views. One is the view that Japan, with its current social, political and economic system, will have difficulty renewing itself, while the other view is that the past success formula of a closed corporate innovation system supported by engineers and "hardware driven" technology is still viable.

With the accelerating pace of globalization and ICT, what will become of Japan, its private sector and public sector? Will its once-leading clean and green technologies survive and make an impact on the resolution of global issues? What are the potential areas for collaboration with the innovative and dynamic Silicon Valley?

About the speaker
As professor of business strategy and innovation at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University, Dr. Yoko Ishikura teaches the Competitiveness and Problem Solving courses, is responsible for the Executive Opinion Survey in Japan for the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, and is a member of the Council for Science & Technology Policy at the Japanese Cabinet Office.

She was a board member of Japan Post and Vodafone KK and is currently a member of the board at Mitsui OSK Lines and the advisory board of All Nippon Airways and is a frequent speaker/moderator at various international forums and seminars, including the Global Innovation Ecosystem Conference, the World Economic Forum and the World Knowledge Forum, among others.

She received an MBA from the Darden School, University of Virginia and DBA from Harvard Business School. She worked at McKinsey Inc. Japan in the late 1980s. Her “Act Globally, Think Locally” was one of the breakthrough ideas for 2007 in the Harvard Business Review.

About the talk

Kicking off SPRIE's seminar series on the emerging environment for entrepreneurship in Japan, this presentation will focus on the changing pattern of venture capital (VC) investments there. Michael Korver will address issues related to venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan in the context of the experiences of Global Venture Capital and its partners during the last twelve years.

Recently, Japan has seen a rapid evolution of financing for new firms, including rapid changes to its VC industry. Mr. Korver's firm is in the vanguard of that evolution. He will discuss aspects of Japanese VC companies from their earliest inception to the latest trends--from bank subsidiaries to independent funds--and he will share his observations about entrepreneurial startups in Japan.

About the speaker

Michael Korver is a co-founding partner of Global Venture Capital (GVC). He was born and raised in Tokyo and first developed his insider's perspective on Asian business from his experience as an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo from 1983 until 1986, and as an international transactions lawyer with Richards & O'Neil in New York and Tokyo from 1987 until 1993.

Since 1993 Korver has worked as an international business consultant, corporate lawyer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Tokyo. He has founded or co-founded several companies and has served on the boards of a number of them. From 1999 until 2002 he was in charge of legal and business affairs at The News Corporation Limited Japan, the Japanese operations of the international media conglomerate. Korver currently serves as professor in the MBA program at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of Hitotsubashi University where he teaches courses in entrepreneurship and venture capital.

Korver received the BA, the MA in Economics and the JD all from the University of California at Berkeley. He is licensed to practice law in the States of New York and California.

Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Patrick Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His dissertation, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Strategic Logic of Mass Atrocities in Civil Wars," asks why ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence frequently increase dramatically after international actors threaten to intervene militarily or deploy significant numbers of troops in coercive interventions. Johnston received a BA in history and a BA in political science, both with distinction, from the University of Minnesota, Morris and an MA in political science from Northwestern University.

Page Fortna (Ph.D. Harvard University 1998) is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of, Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She is currently finishing a book evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars (forthcoming, Princeton University Press), and is beginning a project on long-term historical trends in war termination. She has been a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2004-2005) and a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Patrick Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His dissertation, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Strategic Logic of Mass Atrocities in Civil Wars," asks why ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence frequently increase dramatically after international actors threaten to intervene militarily or deploy significant numbers of troops in coercive interventions. Johnston received a BA in history and a BA in political science, both with distinction, from the University of Minnesota, Morris and an MA in political science from Northwestern University.

Stephen J. Stedman joined CISAC in 1997 as a senior research scholar, and was named a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC and professor of political science (by courtesy) in 2002. He served as the center's acting co-director for the 2002-2003 academic year. Currently he directs the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford and CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. His current research addresses the future of international organizations and institutions, an area of study inspired by his recent work at the United Nations. In the fall of 2003 he was recruited to serve as the research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to stay on at the U.N. as a special advisor with the rank of assistant secretary-general, to help gain worldwide support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to CISAC. Before coming to Stanford, Stedman was an associate professor of African studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on issues of peacekeeping in civil war, light weapons proliferation and conflict in Africa, and preventive diplomacy. In 2000 Scott Sagan and he founded the CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies. Stedman received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1988.

Edward Miguel received his PhD at Harvard in 2000, the same year he joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005. He recently received the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics for "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities" (with Michael Kremer), which appeared in Econometrica. He also was the recipient of the 2005 Sloan Fellowship. At Berkeley he has received the Best Graduate Adviser Award and the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Miguel is co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources, associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics, director of the U.C. Berkeley Scientific Evaluation for Global Action program, co-organizer for Working Group in African Political Economy, associate director at CIDER, an NBER faculty research associate, a CEPR research fellow, a senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a research affiliate at the MIT Poverty Action Lab. He also has worked as a consultant for non-governmental organizations on projects in Delhi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone.

Teresa Whitfield (speaker) joined the Social Science Research Council in early March 2005 to direct the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF). Her latest book, Friends Indeed: the United Nations, Groups of Friends and the Resolution of Conflict, was researched and written while a visiting fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. From 1995-2000 Teresa worked as an official within the UN’s Department of Political Affairs, latterly in the Office of the Under-Secretary-General of Political Affairs. She has also worked as a consultant with the Ford Foundation and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and has a long association with CPPF, serving as regional advisor on Latin America from 2001-2003 and as acting director from 2001-2002. Her research interests include the United Nations, peace operations and the mediation of internal conflict. She has published on peace processes in Central America and Colombia, as well as on the role played by informal groups of states, or “Friends” in the resolution of conflict. A journalist and filmmaker in her early career, Teresa’s publications include Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Temple University Press, 1994), written while living in El Salvador from 1990-1992, and, most recently, a chapter on Colombia co-authored with Cynthia J. Arnson in Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict (ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2005). She holds an MA in Latin American studies from the University of London and a BA in English literature from Cambridge University.

Patrick Johnston (discussant) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His dissertation, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Strategic Logic of Mass Atrocities in Civil Wars," asks why ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence frequently increase dramatically after international actors threaten to intervene militarily or deploy significant numbers of troops in coercive interventions. Johnston received a BA in history and a BA in political science, both with distinction, from the University of Minnesota, Morris and an MA in political science from Northwestern University.