MIT Sloan Management Review

International Business, Management of Technology and Innovation

 

Pathways of Technological Diffusion in Japan

By Richard J. Samuels

April 15, 1994

DURING THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, JAPAN HAS DEVELOPED GLOBAL PREEMINENCE IN MANY TECHNOLOGIES USED FOR BOTH MILITARY AND COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS, without making significant investments dedicated to the military economy. The United States, by contrast, has pursued guns and butter simultaneously by directing public expenditures toward military goals. As a result, its defense establishment became the largest single source of R&D funding in the world. Despite this massive effort directed toward military ends, the relative strength of the U.S. technical base has declined. The author, in a forthcoming book, examines how Japan’s concept of national security developed to encompass technological strength and how its institutions support that concept. This excerpt looks in detail at the pathways along which technology is diffused within and across Japanese industries. Excerpted primarily from chapter 8 of “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, copyright © 1994 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

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American policymakers, during the Cold War, treated technology and economic strength as means to achieve military and political ends. The Japanese, in contrast, never subordinated economic interests to defense objectives and, indeed, rejected arguments to that effect as naive. Instead, the Japanese saw technology and territory alike as vital national interests that could and had to be defended. Two different ways of approaching civilian and military technology development thus grew from the divergent ideas that the United States and Japan had about national interests. For years, the Cold War obscured the consequences of that divergence and made it possible for Americans to believe that they had found the single right way of defining and organizing to meet their defense needs.

In the United States during the Cold War, private research and development grew considerably smaller relative to public R&D. In Japan, the opposite was true. Military R&D became the single largest source of R&D spending in the United States, whereas, in Japan, it virtually disappeared. Since both military and trade relationships depend increasingly on technology, and since the end of the Cold War is stimulating considerable readjustment, the relationship between civilian and military activities within each of our economies has become central to the U.S.-Japan relationship. Americans have lessons to learn from the way the Japanese have subordinated defense production yet have emerged as one... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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