[go: up one dir, main page]

IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/adspcp/978-3-642-35801-2_17.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Managing the Japanese Service Industry: Location, Competitiveness and Internationalization

In: Service Industries and Regions

Author

Listed:
  • Patrik Ström

    (University of Gothenburg)

Abstract
Japan has been a leading industrial power during the last 50 years. The manufacturing industry has developed world leading competitiveness and productivity. The service industry on the other hand has been less competitive and internationalized in comparison with other OECD countries. Increased regional and global competition changes the role of Japan in the knowledge intensive economy. Services are becoming a more important part of the future competitiveness of the economy. Japan is facing a number of challenges to foster a competitive knowledge economy with a high degree of services. The paper seeks to explore the advanced service industry and its connections to the manufacturing sector through two perspectives. First, structural and cultural reasons in the business environment could help to explain the limited success of the service industry. Service internalization and bundling of services have made it difficult for independent firms to compete. Japanese firms need to rethink their global strategy and build networks that are in line with knowledge creation and globalization. Service firms must clearly define their strategy for localization and internationalization. Manufacturing firms need to develop their offering of bundled services in order to move from free to fee. Companies that are well placed to produce value-added for clients through the product life cycle utilizing the broad base of intra- and inter-firm competence would enhance their competitiveness. Second, uneven regional economic development has proven to be a hurdle for the development of a knowledge intensive service economy. Knowledge flows between companies in regional economic clusters has proven difficult. The paper uses primary and secondary data on the national, regional and company levels to shows the difficulties, but also the potential that exist within the service industry in Japan.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrik Ström, 2013. "Managing the Japanese Service Industry: Location, Competitiveness and Internationalization," Advances in Spatial Science, in: Juan R. Cuadrado-Roura (ed.), Service Industries and Regions, edition 127, chapter 0, pages 407-424, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:adspcp:978-3-642-35801-2_17
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-35801-2_17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:adspcp:978-3-642-35801-2_17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.