Successive Innovations in Global and Local Markets: Strategies of Global Niche Top Enterprises in Japan

摘要

For many manufacturing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), it is very important to produce successive innovations for surviving in the recent hard competition in global market. This research introduces some cases of so-called Global Niche Top (GNT) enterprises as best practices of producing successive innovations. Through the research, their efforts to produce successive innovations were discussed and the key factor of success (KFS) was analyzed. One effort was to combine technical innovation and service innovation, and another was to combine local business and global business. Both efforts completely depended on aggressive entrepreneurship of the enterprise top managers. Solidarity and loyalty of the employees were also important for accumulating tacit knowledge in technology and gaining credibility for customers as their competitive competence.