Disrupting Japan

Most great startup ideas don’t grab your attention right away. It takes a while before the founder’s vision becomes obvious to the rest of us. On the other hand, the startups that immediately grab all the press attention often go out of business shortly after shipping their first product. Reality never seems to live up the to promise.

And then there are products like Orphe. This LED-emblazoned, WiFi-connected, social-network enabled dancing shoe seems made for fluffy, flashy Facebook sharing, but only when you really dig into it, do you understand what it really is and the potential it has in the marketplace.

Today we sit down with Yuya Kikukawa, founder of No New Folk Studio and the creator of the Orphe, and we talk about music, hardware financing, and why this amazing little shoe is finding early adopters in places from game designers to hospitals.

It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Today I am going to correct two big mistakes; one of my own and one of society's.

I lot of listeners emailed me about the comments I made regarding how Japanese companies treat their employees and customers while they are pregnant. I got it wrong, so I would like to set the record straight.

I also explain what I see as the obvious answer to the current #KuToo controversy. I realize that this puts me at serious risk of having to publish another retraction, but I think it's an important way of looking at this problem.

Please enjoy, and let me know what you think.

There is big news for Tim and for Disrupting Japan this week.

It's a very short episode, and I have no special links or show notes this time around. Please give the show a listen for the big reveal, and please accept my sincere thanks for all your support over the years. 

Disrupting Japan is just getting started. The best is yet to come.

Technology is global, but ideas are local.

The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the world, but a small Japanese startup might be who helps us make sense of it all.

There is amazing work being done in user experience design, but most designers are operating with the contract of keeping users engaged. This is a fundamental shift from the traditional user-centered and functional design approaches.

Today we sit down with Kaz Oki, founder of Mui Labs, and we talk about user design can actually improve our lives and help us disengage.

We also talk about the challenges of getting VCs to invest in hardware startups, why Kyoto might be Japan's next innovation hub, and what it takes for a startup to successfully spin out of a Japanese company

It's a great discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it.

Technology develops differently in Japan.

While US tech giants have been grabbing artificial intelligence headlines, a business AI sector has been quietly maturing in Japan, and it is now making inroads into America. 

Today we sit down again with Miku Hirano, CEO of Cinnamon, and we talk about how exactly this happened. 

Interestingly, Cinnamon did not start out as an AI company. In fact, when Miku first came on the show, the company had just launched an innovative video-sharing service. Today, we talk about what lead to the pivot to AI and why even a great idea and a great team is no guarantee of success.

We also talk about some of the changing attitudes towards startups and women in Japan, the kinds of business practices AI will never change, and Miku give some practical advice for startups going into foreign markets. 

It's a great discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it.

Ari Horie has always had a different approach to supporting women entrepreneurs.

She doesn't talk about "empowering" women and sensitivity training is not in her toolkit. Ari is showing the startup world that incorporating some of the problem-solving skills and leadership techniques favored by women improves their chance of success.

Women having a leading role in entrepreneurship is not the socially responsible thing to do. It is the most profitable thing to do. Ari's been on stage with some of the most powerful men in Japan including Prime Minister Abe and Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten, and her message is starting to take hold.

Entrepreneurship provides a much more level playing field than any other kind of business, and we should not be surprised that a lot of women excel here, and they often do it by doing things differently from their male competitors.

Startups that plan to survive need to use all the tools at their disposal, and Ari explains exactly how this is happening.

Japanese enterprises are their own worst enemy when it comes to innovation.

In this live panel discussion, I talk about my experience driving innovation at TEPCO, and Ion and Jenson share their experiences running innovation labs. This panel was part of the btrax Design for Innovation event in Tokyo last week.

We talk about the specific challenges that Japanese companies are facing and the strategies we've used -- with varying degrees of success --  to help overcome them.

Of course, like everyone else, I always remember the most important thing to say ten minutes too late, so I've added those thoughts to the outro at the end of the podcast.

It's a great conversation with four people who really care about innovation in Japan, and I think you'll enjoy it.

This year at CEATEC, I was on stage with founders from two very different hardware startups.

We talk in-depth about what it takes to be a hardware startup in a world where venture capital seems fixated on SaaS companies and software platforms. 

Although their startups seem very different, Tomo Hagiwara and Keith Tan had very similar core experiences.

Tomo and Keith share some great advice about raising money as a hardware startup, how to give large companies confidence that your product will meet their quality standards, and some pretty surprising answers to questions about the best way to go global.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

The promise of AI is easily understood by anyone with an imagination, and for 40 years, venture capitalists have been enthusiastically investing in that promise.

However, it's been significantly harder for founders to turn that investment into sustainable business models. 

Today we are going to look at why that is, and go over what might be a blueprint for startups to create business models around artificial intelligence.

Tatsuo Nakamura founded Valuenex in 2006 with the goal of using artificial intelligence to supplement the work being done by patent attorneys, and their software was instrumental in the resolution of one of Japan's most famous, and most valuable, lawsuits.  the Blue LED patent case.

We also talk about how to sell to large companies as a small startup, the challenges in trying to make product strategy based on technology, why staying private longer is not always a good thing for startups, and how Valuenex technology accidentally discovered a secret collaboration between Honda and Google.

It's a great discussion with the founder of one of Japan's most successful AI companies, and I think you will really enjoy it.

Education is very hard to disrupt.

That’s both good and bad. Education is so important to both individuals and society, it should not be changed on a whim, but over time it seems that our institutions of higher education have drifted away from meeting students real needs.

Yoshito Hori, founder and CEO of Globis, is making radical changes. He turned a small training school into Japan's first independent and fully accredited business school with an MBA. Less than ten years later, Globis became Japan’s most popular MBA program.

We talk about the need for change in education and about the successful, real-world pilot program Globis is running to modernize Japanese higher education. Yoshito also shares insights on how to teach innovative thinking and explains why such a high percentage of Globis MBAs go on to found starts or join them.

It's a fascinating discussion and I think you'll really enjoy it.

Show Notes

Why most Japanese do not want to attend full-time MBA programs

How to make an advanced degree both exclusive and inexpensive

How to groom MBA students to start startups

How Sumitomo missed out on a multi-billion dollar business

Why Japanese higher education is so resistant to change

This difference between SPOCs and MOOCs, and why it's important

How drinking in front of your computer might save higher education