Japanese and US perspectives on the National Innovation Ecosystem

Coinciding with a proposal for a National Innovation Ecosystem (NIES) by the US Council on Competitiveness, Japan's Industrial Structure Council proposed a major shift from a technology policy to an innovation policy based on the ecosystem concept. While Japan and the US achieved success through mutual inspiration in the 1980s and 1990s, both countries need a new approach to sustaining their national innovation, especially in light of the new paradigm for a post-information society, which began in the early 2000s. Realizing this need led both countries to reexamine the broader applications of the ecosystem discipline to technology policy systems. This paper analyzes the parallel paths of technology policy in Japan and the US over the last three decades. We found that the development cycle in both countries is governed by four ecosystem principles: (1) sustainable development through substitution, (2) self-propagation through co-evolution, (3) organizational inertia and inspired learning from competitors, and (4) heterogeneous synergy.