Managing Information in a Japanese Laboratory

When an American company is considering building a research facility in a foreign country, the question is frequently asked: "Why not expand facilities in the U.S. instead?" Certainly, by any objective measure of cost-effectiveness, to build a clone of a U.S. research (as opposed to development) laboratory in another industrialized country does not make much sense. Such action can only be justified by defining ways in which the foreign laboratory can be differentiated from that in the parent country and deciding how this differentiation can be used to augment the effectiveness of the overall research effort. This, in turn, may be related to specific aspects of the culture of the country where the laboratory will be located. Japan provides an excellent example in many areas of both the opportunities and challenges posed to a U.S. company by cultural differences. I shall address only one of these areas here: the gathering and dissemination of information. The term "Information Society" has been applied to Japan with good reason because the accumulation of information is much more actively pursued in Japan than elsewhere in the industrialized world (1). There is a culture of storing information that has no obvious application in the present but may have unforeseen advantages in the future (2). It is probable that this attitude was purposely cultivated at the time of the Meiji Restoration and the ensuing modernization of Japan (3). It seems likely that the Japanese were the first nation to really understand the importance of information as a national resource. In most Japanese companies, information gathering is considered to be an integral part of the job of all technical employees at any level. In many companies, this is formalized and each staff member is assigned a specific area or areas in which he or she is expected to be constantly aware of new developments (2). It should be emphasized that, as suggested above, this goes well beyond keeping up with the literature on one's current research project. In fact, it may involve gathering information on a topic of no current interest to the company but one that may, conceivably, become important in the future. The sources of this information can be very diverse and the priorities of various types of access quite different from elsewhere. In the U.S. and Europe, the most widely used sources of new technical information are journal publications and scientific databases. In Japan, on the other hand, personal exchange of information through a human network is at least as, and probably more, important. Much more so than in the West, Japanese technical people keep close and constant contact with former fellow students and professors, technical persons within their extended family, and so on, in order to learn about new developments. It is vital that Western companies be plugged into this human network if they are to learn, in a timely manner, of technical advances made by Japanese industry (4). Furthermore, it has been estimated by the European Community that there are approximately 300,000 significant technical publications published per year in Japan, excluding the very large number of patent applications, patents and related materials. Of these, only about 200,000 are retrievable by non-Japanese using conventional sources. This leaves some 100,000 publications that are accessible to Japanese companies but are lost to those Westerners who have no effective information-gathering capability in Japan. A simple example of the value of access to this human network is the following: A division of W.R. Grace had the opportunity to become a supplier of a product but could not find a source for a reactive resin that would yield a product with the required specifications. Using personal contacts of the staff at Grace's Japan Research Center, a company in Japan supplying such a resin was located. Since this company neither advertised the product nor had literature in English, it is unlikely that it would have been located in any other way. …