Japanese Process Management Through a Startup Lens - A Case Study of New Product Development Process Patterns in Tokyo-based Startup Companies

Abstract: The past few decades have been turbulent for the Japanese economy. Creating a thriving startup environment is one of the pillars of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plan to revive the country's economy. Against this background, and the rich manufacturing history of Japan, this thesis researches a crucial part of the process of building a successful startup, namely the product development process. Specifically, we study the patterns of creating more ideas, called diverging, and closing down ideas, called converging, in Japanese, Tokyo-based startup companies. We also look at the experience and behaviors of founding teams that pursue these patterns of divergence and convergence. This area of study lies in the intersection between entrepreneurship and new product development/innovation management as part of operations management. The area has been covered extensively in pop-science literature, but to a lacking degree in academia. We can conclude from our research, that a pattern of deliberate diverging and converging is associated with success while skipping diverging and converging and going straight to implementation is associated with failure. Founding teams that use a deliberate approach and have both market experience and implementation experience seem to be more successful than those who are missing either area. The most typical divergence behavior is brainstorming, and the most commonly cited convergence behavior is speaking to customers. Founding teams that go straight to implementation, in many cases do it because of having seen a successful business model elsewhere and tried to copy it. The framework presented could be used to study a larger number of subjects, to provide proof where we find mere associations and to allow for comparison where we merely report findings from a narrow context.