Toward Creativity in Japan : Tactics Are Varied, but Aim Is the Same

Canon has built brainstorming rooms. Fujitsu has put up office partitions for privacy. Hitachi has cut cumbersome middle management. And Toshiba is turning to women.

The ingredients differ, but each company is trying to concoct a recipe for the same thing: more creativity among researchers.

Although Japan’s private sector has doubled research spending in the past decade, executives say money isn’t enough. The key, they say, is to create new kinds of conditions and policies that will liberate researchers, allowing them to pursue pioneering work. Given Japan’s tradition of incremental improvements through consensus thinking, that is no small task.

“Frankly speaking, my biggest job is how to give a creative environment to our engineers,” said Masaka Ogi, president of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. “Fujitsu is asking us to find breakthroughs in various areas. Japanese companies are now getting rich and can spend big money on R&D;, but it’s not a problem of money. The most important thing is a good environment.”

How are Japanese firms pursuing innovation? Consider:

Canon: Meditation

In Atsugi, 20 miles southwest of Tokyo, Canon Inc. has built what may be the nation’s most futuristic basic research laboratory. The surrounding hills and trees inspire the mind, while the center’s pastel decor soothes it.

Inside, Canon supplies not one but two types of brainstorming rooms: Western and Japanese, lined in carpets or tatami, where researchers can stimulate group creativity. For working out problems in solitary contemplation, there are meditation rooms. The dining hall isn’t called a cafeteria but a “communication plaza,” and the curved “biotables” make it obvious why. Forget trying to slink to a solitary corner to wolf down lunch, because virtually anywhere you sit, someone will face you.

“Creativity is very much rooted in the individual, so you have to give the individual freedom and time to think,” said Hajime Mitarai, the senior managing director who built the lab five years ago. “But creativity is also associated with interacting with colleagues and stimulating each other. We try to do both.”

Researchers are required to report to the lab only from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. They build the rest of their schedule around their creative needs. They are given pocket beepers to shield them from having to answer telephone calls that aren’t for them. The firm also grants employees as many as 10 “refresh holidays” a year, in addition to a new two-week summer vacation.

To diversify the firm’s research against what Mitarai calls his “single-race country where everybody thinks the same way,” Canon has opened a lab near London and plans to open one in California later this year. Next year, the firm will strike out in what Mitarai calls a “dramatically different direction.” It will open a “Geocenter” in Kyoto for what it hopes will be groundbreaking environmental research into clean solar energy. In carrying out the research, it will use technologies, such as photovoltaic devices, related to its copier and camera business.

“If we stay as just a manufacturer and exporter, nobody likes us,” Mitarai said. “To be appreciated by people in the world, we have to become earth citizens.”

When it established itself as a camera company in 1937, Canon was basically an “assembly company putting boxes together,” Mitarai said. Components were from other sources. Then the company began producing not only its own components but also its own ground-breaking products: the world’s first automatic camera, first commercially successful laser printer and first full-color laser copier.

“Now we are putting more emphasis on what is in the box--or, to put it in one phrase, materials research,” Mitarai said. “We are looking at revolutionary functions out of new materials.”

Canon’s technological evolution, reflective of that of many Japanese firms, has placed new demands on its researchers to plumb uncharted scientific territory. Today, seeking breakthroughs in such fields as biotechnology and superconductivity, Canon has doubled its research spending to 5.5% of its $9.4 billion in annual sales last year from 2.6% in 1980. In the process, the firm, which sells cameras, business machines and other optical products, has become the third-largest recipient of U.S. patents.

Toshiba: Not a Male Club

Toshiba has also opened an advanced lab and adopted other research-enhancing measures. But it may boast the most intriguing research-productivity tool of all: women.

Even though a higher proportion of women than men pursue college educations in Japan, they account for only 4.6% of the nation’s scientists and engineers, one-third the U.S. figure. But about 10% of Toshiba’s 900 researchers are women, which is believed to be one of the highest ratios in Japan.

They are people like Hiromi Kobayashi, a graduate in physics now researching oxygen sensors; Naotaka Uchitomi, who is probing gallium arsenide semiconductors, and Masako Nakahashi, who joined Toshiba 20 years ago as one of a handful of women researchers and now leads a team of five men in metals study.

“Toshiba had a great understanding for female researchers. They told me: ‘We want you to work as long as you can,’ ” Kobayashi said. “My sister tried to get a job at another company as a researcher, but she couldn’t because she was a woman.”

Kobayashi claims that women approach research more flexibly and patiently. In one experiment, she recalled, she obtained results long after a male colleague gave up.

“I did a lot of funny things which are not in papers or books,” she said. “Female researchers are more adventurous.”

Sakae Shimizu, Toshiba’s senior executive vice president, said the company began vigorously recruiting women a few years ago to bring an added dimension to research and help fill Japan’s pressing shortage of engineers.

“In Japan, this resource has been vastly under-utilized,” said Shimizu, a man.

Fujitsu: Lessons From Silicon Valley

Fujitsu has put up partitions for privacy. It has linked researchers through workstations to stimulate electronic brainstorming. It has nearly doubled R&D; spending during the past five years, to more than 10% of its $18 billion in annual sales.

Two-thirds of the projects are selected by the laboratory, instead of the business units--compared to half 10 years ago.

Some of the new policies came from Silicon Valley, where Ogi spent 3 1/2 years as president of Fujitsu America Inc.

The partitions, for instance. While in the United States, Ogi proposed lowering partitions to foster Japanese-style collaboration. He immediately faced American-style confrontation. His U.S. staff promptly brought him a thick report describing the link between physical barriers and excellent research. He was convinced. He returned to Japan in 1988--and set up dividers.

The researchers say they love those and other changes. “If each researcher has a creative idea, he can gather researchers with the same idea to realize a new thing,” said Shigeru Sasaki, a researcher in pattern information processing.

In 1988, the firm scored major triumphs in the race to build the world’s fastest supercomputer, developing two near-practical applications of devices that greatly speed a computer’s processing power. Today, the firm is targeting the field of artificial intelligence, aiming to make it more accessible to business computer users, said lab director Shigeru Sato.

The quest for original research was intensified after what Fujitsu researchers call the “IBM accident.” That was the 1983 dispute stemming from IBM’s charges that Fujitsu illegally copied the IBM software code that made Fujitsu computers compatible with top-selling IBM mainframes. IBM and Fujitsu agreed to a binding arbitration proceeding in which the issue of guilt was not addressed. Under the 1988 arbitration ruling, Fujitsu was granted a restricted right to examine IBM’s software--but it has paid more than $833 million for the privilege.

“Fujitsu people had a good experience: Copying is bad,” Sasaki said.

Hitachi: Research Streamlined

Hitachi Ltd. was also forced into greater innovation by scandal. In 1982, Hitachi employees were arrested on charges of industrial espionage against IBM. Hitachi was caught trying to pilfer some of IBM’s operating system software. Both sides agreed to keep the settlement confidential.

“Since the Big Blue problem, we have to develop the very basic software by ourselves,” said Sumihisa Kotani, Hitachi’s chief engineer. Kotani said Hitachi’s 150% boost in research spending the past decade--to $2.7 billion this year--has primarily focused on software, microelectronics and computer hardware.

Still, Hitachi has a record of original research in its own right. In 1981, it became the first Japanese firm to crack the list of the top five recipients of U.S. patents. Since then, it has climbed to No. 1.

Japan’s granddaddy of corporate research, Hitachi maintains 33 research labs with 16,000 staff members. In 1985, it opened a new advanced research laboratory, where more than 90 researchers are probing software science, biotechnology, new materials and electron/radiation beam physics, a field that could unlock ways to observe DNA structures and new materials in three dimensions.

Lab director Eiichi Maruyama said one key feature was cutting out middle management. Instead, researchers report directly to Maruyama and consult twice a year with an advisory committee of academics.

“Usually, if young scientists want to propose some new research theme, in many labs they must propose it first to a group leader, then the department manager, then the planning office staff, then the deputy general manager, then the general manager,” Maruyama said. “We believe the best way is to reduce the number of steps for this basic research. The individual’s idea is very, very important.”

Matsushita Electric: New Freedoms

At Matsushita’s Museum of Technology in Osaka, the writing is literally on the wall. Posted amid 2,600 consumer gizmos ranging from flat TVs to multilingual robots, a company poster heralds Matsushita’s new crusade:

“Corporate slogan for 1990: Breakthrough.”

Hiroyuki Mizuno, senior managing director of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., maintains that basic research doesn’t exist in Japan, so he’s preparing a radical experiment to promote it.

Next year, Matsushita will open a lab in which 20 to 30 researchers will be free to pursue scientific discoveries with no commercial objectives. Researchers will select projects entirely on their own. They will be able to work when and where they want. They will be evaluated--and financially compensated--strictly on results.

But his colleagues’ response to his plan underscores one of Japan’s key creative blocks: He could not persuade one Japanese researcher to take such a gamble. So he plans initially to staff the lab with foreign scientists.

Mizuno also said he plans to push for a huge increase in research and development spending--from the current 5.8% to 15% of the conglomerate’s $42 billion in sales. The company sells consumer electronics and communications equipment under the brand names National, Panasonic, Technics and Quasar.

“Maybe you can say that radios, TVs and VCRs are all based on the same ideas, and when they come to market we are forced to compete with U.S. or European companies,” Mizuno said. “But if we focus on our own ideas . . . a totally new technology where there are no Western inventions, this can only contribute to humankind. That is the way to avoid troubles.”