Getting ready to speak at The Economist Fifth Japan CFO Roundtable on “The Road Forward for Japanese Companies” – Four Seasons Hotel – Chinzanso, Tokyo.
Update: I spent about 10 minutes speaking about how Japanese corporations should approach innovation, entrepreneurship and going global. The speech went by very quickly, but since I did it in English, I believe I did a better job than my recent TED experience. After the presentation, it switched to a moderated session where we had a pretty good Q&A session.
Unfortunately, due to jet lagg or something, I ended up giving a long winded non-answer to the last moderated question which was along the lines of “Many Japanese say basic innovation and research should be the responsibility of large companies and government. What would be your response to that.” I should have said that “Yes, things like the Internet, only governments can really initiate. However, things like Facebook (Mixi here), Twitter, Amazon (Rakuten) or eBay would not have been possible by either large companies or governments.”
I forgot what answer I actually gave….