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.

A part of the Responsible Supply Chain Conference at the Graduate School of Business.

Sponsored by The Stanford Center for Social Innovation, and Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum

This is the second meeting of the “Just Supply Chains” working group, to be held at Stanford University on May 16-17, 2008. It will builds on the themes and debates that came out of our first meeting, held at MIT in January, 2008, but extends them by focusing more on issues related to national level and global regulation. Please find, attached, a description of the Just Supply Chains project.  

Our first meeting brought together an exciting group of academics, business managers, leaders of various labor-rights NGOs, and representatives of the ILO to discuss the role of corporate codes of conduct and other private voluntary efforts have played in promoting just employment relations in global supply chains. We focused on issues of fair compensation, decent and healthy working conditions, and rights of association. Although this first meeting also discussed some innovative experiments taking place within certain sectors or even within individual nation-states, the bulk of our time was spent debating the possibilities and limitations of private voluntary regulatory efforts promoted by both corporations and NGOs.

Five key themes/questions emerged from our January meeting: 

1. What are the costs and benefits associated with traditional labor compliance programs and how are these costs and benefits distributed among the different actors operating across global supply chains?
2. Related to this first theme is a second set of questions about “ethical consumption.”
3. A third issue that emerged from our discussions in January centered on independent unions and the rights of individual workers to associate and bargain collectively for improved wages, working conditions, and work hours.
4. Our fourth set of concerns builds directly on the previous issues: What can we learn from various national-level experiments with regulatory reform, especially in some of the larger developing countries?
5. Finally, how do global governance arrangements, in particular as they relate to bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements impact the promotion of just working conditions across global supply chains?

These five themes will be the focus of our May 16-17 workshop at Stanford. As with our first workshop, our minimal hope is to establish a common basis of knowledge and generate lively discussions around these important issues. Our more ambitious agenda is to generate a collaborative research agenda on these issues – research that will have an important impact not only on various academic disciplines but also on real-world practice and policy. To facilitate these two goals, we have once again invited a diverse group of academics, business managers, and NGO and IGO representatives to share their respective knowledge and engage in collective discussions and debates.

» Just Supply Chains - May Papers and Powerpoints (password protected)