Tadao Kiyonari
Professor Emeritus，Hosei University
Special Adviser，The Japan Academic Society
for Ventures and Entrepreneurs(JASVE)

More and more people in the Japanese business community see roadblocks ahead on the pathway to the future. Many lose confidence when their successes are followed by failure. The situation in the manufacturing sector is not entirely bleak, yet many of our existing industries are mature, and performance gaps are widening between companies in every sector. Businesses are starting to fall by the wayside.
The only way to break out of this stagnation is through the creation of new industries. The economic recovery achieved by the United States in the 1990s was attributable, in large measure, to the emergence of new industries based on innovation by numerous venture companies. For evidence of this one has only to consider the achievements of high-growth venture firms such as Microsoft, Compaq, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Oracle and Dell Computer.
Many in Japan assume that new industries will germinate naturally if we can just ease government regulation. In fact, deregulation merely creates business opportunity, but this does not lead automatically to the creation of new industries. For that we need entrepreneurship. Deregulation is simply one of the prerequisites for the process-it is not the only necessary condition.
We need to foster entrepreneurship in Japan by creating an entrepreneurial culture, and once an entrepreneurial culture is in place, the number of entrepreneurs will expand of its own volition.
Respect for individuality and tolerance of difference are among the general conditions required to foster an entrepreneurial culture. Encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit is also very important, but encouragement alone is not enough to guarantee success. The advancement of entrepreneurship will inevitably be accompanied by a high incidence of failure. Accordingly, we need to develop a culture that is tolerant of failure. To be more precise, we must give a second chance to those who have learned from failure. That does not mean, however, that we should simply accept failure.
There are number of critical points in the business development process. The challenge for the entrepreneur is to find ways to survive at each of these critical points, and this is an essential area for research. In addition to a positive list of conditions for success, it is
also useful to offer entrepreneurs a negative list -a"don't do list"-setting out ways in which to avoid failure. Without both such lists, survival through the critical points is not easy.
In an era that places a premium on intellectually creative activity, cooperation between industry, academia and government will be more important than ever for the creation of new industries. It will be important, too, to study the actual cooperative processes that link industry, academia and government. By identifying programs in industry-academia-government cooperation, it should be possible to invigorate the cooperative process.
The research priorities for this JASVE are many and varied, and a multi-disciplinary approach is essential. Also, we will need to manage our activities differently from those of other research associations. Factors that will contribute to the expansion of our research activities include the formation of study groups and the development of study group initiatives in response to the autonomous discovery of new research themes and networking among various subgroups. We are confident that members will benefit considerably from active participation.