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How do you promote innovation within a company? [NES 2014 Panel]

Masaru Ikeda 2014.04.10

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

The morning session on day two of the New Economy Summit in Tokyo opened with a panel on how companies can spur innovation, and it boasted an all-star panel of speakers:

Matt Wilsey, entrepreneur and investor
Akira Morikawa, CEO of Line Corporation
Jerry Yang, Co-founder, AME Cloud Ventures

Morikawa-san started off the panel with an introduction to Line (which we have covered extensively, a service that has now reached 400 million users. From his perspective, regardless of the scale of your organization, everyone can create a disruptive business. The problem is that every organization has nay-sayers when you come up with a new idea, and that is typically the biggest obstacle when trying to executing.

morikawa-internal-innovation — Line CEO Akira Morikawa

Japanese people tend to follow a plan, and avoid changing it once it’s in place. So at his company, they make no detailed plan for the long term, and that helps their employees stay ready for unexpected changes based on user responses. He emphasized that it is not their management but rather their users who should decide if a new idea is good or bad.

Jerry Yang is best known as the founder of search giant Yahoo, but he’s currently working as an investor in Silicon Valley. His company, AME Cloud Ventures, has invested in over 50 startups, many of which are running data-driven businesses. He’s expecting huge potential in this sector since a big data methodology will enable any industry to rethink and rebuild things in our world. His strategy is based on an assumption/prediction about what will happen in the near future, and from there he decides what kind of startups to invest in.

In a response to the moderator’s [1] question about how to promote an entrepreneurial mindset at a company, Jerry explained there has to be a sense of urgency. Startups have obviously have it, but established companies also require it in order to make something new happen from the inside.

Matt noted that we can’t force anyone to be innovative. All we can do is create an environment that is friendly to innovation. Innovations typically happen in a place you’d never expect. And one of the biggest failures for companies when they have no time to create an environment or a culture that permits employees to try and fail.

The panel was moderated by Takeshi Natsuno, a professor at Keio University. ↩

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Inside Tencent: What lies ahead for China’s internet giant?

Masaru Ikeda 2014.04.10

See the original article written in Japanese Some might suppose that Chinese internet companies would have their headquarters in the capital Beijing. But they don’t. Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, while the country’s top game company Shanda is in Shanghai. And Shenzhen in the south is the home of Tencent. I recently had an opportunity to visit Shenzhen to attend Infinity Venture Partners’ LP Summit 1, during which I had a chance to visit to Tencent. The company’s headquarters are located in the Science and Technology Park in the western part of the city, inside 37-story skyrise. Surprisingly, this gigantic building is a little small for Tencent, and they’re now building another 55-story, two-tower facility. That building (a model of which you can see below) is scheduled to open in 2016, and it will house 12,000 employees. The building is designed by NBBJ, also the designers of Amazon headquarters building in Seattle. On the second floor there is a big screen that displays real-time access to Tencent’s QQ instant messaging software (see below). I saw over 170 million users accessing the service, which was probably light considering that it was a weekday morning. Also on that floor was Ubox, a…

See the original article written in Japanese

Some might suppose that Chinese internet companies would have their headquarters in the capital Beijing. But they don’t. Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, while the country’s top game company Shanda is in Shanghai. And Shenzhen in the south is the home of Tencent.

I recently had an opportunity to visit Shenzhen to attend Infinity Venture Partners’ LP Summit 1, during which I had a chance to visit to Tencent. The company’s headquarters are located in the Science and Technology Park in the western part of the city, inside 37-story skyrise. Surprisingly, this gigantic building is a little small for Tencent, and they’re now building another 55-story, two-tower facility. That building (a model of which you can see below) is scheduled to open in 2016, and it will house 12,000 employees. The building is designed by NBBJ, also the designers of Amazon headquarters building in Seattle.

On the second floor there is a big screen that displays real-time access to Tencent’s QQ instant messaging software (see below). I saw over 170 million users accessing the service, which was probably light considering that it was a weekday morning.

Also on that floor was Ubox, a vending machine where people can buy things by paying with their mobile, either using AliPay (by Weibo) or TenPay (by Tencent). Here in Japan, there are an increasing number of vending machines accepting electronic money. In China, it seems services like Weibo and QQ are helping drive that trend too.

Virtual credit cards

Early in March, Tencent and Alibaba announced virtual credit cards within their apps WeChat and AliPay Wallet (respectively). WeChat and AliPay Wallet can be used for some things like taxi service Didi Dache and at some retail stores as well. The companies were both very excited about the launch, hailing it is an innovation in the credit card industry. But soon after launch, government authorities made them shut down the service. Tencent has made efforts to the launch its service by tying up with major banks in China. The background of the authority’s decision is not clear, but some sources say certain banks and credit-card companies were threatened by the rapid increase of virtual credit cards and may have put pressure on government.

Regarding its future strategy, Tencent aims to make financial services more accessible to general consumers by expanding to platforms like WeChat and QQ. The financial services they mention include not only credit cards but also stock exchange and other financial products. In such a big country, cities that have branch offices of a bank or financial services are still limited. So it would be a natural development for mobile apps to fill the void.

Tencent aims to provide financial services for WeChat users in China (where it’s known as Weixin), and so far has no plan to expand that to its overseas users.

Mobile app distribution

There are many homegrown mobile app distribution services catering to the Chinese market. Tencent’s MyApp has a 12% in the share in this space, falling just short of the top three, behind Baidu (38%), Qihoo (28%), and Wandoujia (15%) (as of December 2013).

Tencent’s top priority in this field is to surpass the top three players, and Tencent Open Platform represents its core strategy for doing so. Monkey Hou (pictured below) is the vice president of the Tencent Open Platform, and he brought us up to speed on their current situation.

According to him, Tencent has opened incubation spaces in 10 cities across China with the aim to incubate mobile app startups and bring more appealing apps to their platform. As part of the incubation programs, Tencent offers various benefits such as discounted cloud service, funding, and mentoring. The benefits change depending on the number of downloads for a given app.

Tencent Open Platform, vice president Monkey Hou

In China there are over 10 mobile app distribution platforms. Some wonder why an internet giant like Tencent cannot catch up other players. But Hou explained to us that there is no player with a majority share and China’s market is still really big. He seemed confident they would soon break into the top three.

In February, Japan’ Mixi partnered with Tencent to bring its popular Monster Strike game to China. This is one example of Tencent’s efforts to gain recognition as an app distribution platform. Although it requires localization changes, the Japan’s popular mobile games have good chances to do well in China. I think more and more Chinese platforms will actively try to partner with Japanese game developers in the future.

You may remember my report on HAXLR8R, the Shenzhen accelerator specializing in hardware startups. ↩

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Japan’s Iemo secures funding from B Dash Ventures

iemo

Takeshi Hirano 2014.04.09

See the original story in Japanese. Some of our readers may remember a few months back when we told you about the launch of Tokyo-based Iemo, a new curation media focused on interior decoration and housing. The company announced today it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from B Dash Ventures. Iemo will use these funds to step up its engineering efforts. Coinciding with this news, Japanese search engine expert Yuji Kumagai has joined their management team as COO [1]. The company was initially launched by well-known Japanese entrepreneur Mari Murata. In order to ensure quality content on their platform, they have established partnerships with interior manufacturers and architectural offices to collect high quality images, with the goal of helping users post curated articles more easily. We understand that this approach resulted a corporate membership program which has now launched as well. Interior manufacturers can set up their own curated portfolios, and more than 30 such companies have signed up to date. We were told by Murata and Kumagai that their growth curve shows an exponential increase. Almost 90% of their users are females who visit the website on mobile, many of them housewives (according to their user profiles)….

kumagai-murata — From the left: COO Yuji Kumagai, CEO Mari Murata

See the original story in Japanese.

Some of our readers may remember a few months back when we told you about the launch of Tokyo-based Iemo, a new curation media focused on interior decoration and housing. The company announced today it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from B Dash Ventures. Iemo will use these funds to step up its engineering efforts. Coinciding with this news, Japanese search engine expert Yuji Kumagai has joined their management team as COO ^[1].

The company was initially launched by well-known Japanese entrepreneur Mari Murata. In order to ensure quality content on their platform, they have established partnerships with interior manufacturers and architectural offices to collect high quality images, with the goal of helping users post curated articles more easily.

We understand that this approach resulted a corporate membership program which has now launched as well. Interior manufacturers can set up their own curated portfolios, and more than 30 such companies have signed up to date.

We were told by Murata and Kumagai that their growth curve shows an exponential increase. Almost 90% of their users are females who visit the website on mobile, many of them housewives (according to their user profiles).

They didn’t tell us specific user totals, but we’ll follow up on this when we get more details.

Kumagai founded his own company focused on the search engine technology a few years ago. He also once won a prize at a Facebook hackathon event with his app called Corollin’ Planet (currently unavailable). ↩

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The challenge of innovating the education industry [Panel]

Rick Martin 2014.04.09

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. At the New Economy Summit in Tokyo this afternoon, we had a chance to hear a panel on technology innovation in the area of education. Three speakers participated, moderated by Swimmy Minami of Bizreach: Youngme Moon, the dean of Harvard Business School’s MBA program Dennis Yang, president and CEO COO of Udemy [1] Jun Murai, dean/professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University Youngme opened by discussing what pointing out that most areas in our lives have been vastly changed by technology, but yet education remains relatively the same. If you compare learning years ago, and learning today, it continues to be very tedious and very uninspiring. When it comes to education, the audience is essentially captive and the teacher has little incentive to be very engaging. It is remarkably easy to get away with being a boring teacher. You just need to be an information delivery system […] and the student’s their job to absorb it. Does the system work? Sort of. But it is deeply flawed. ¶ She points to the example…

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

At the New Economy Summit in Tokyo this afternoon, we had a chance to hear a panel on technology innovation in the area of education. Three speakers participated, moderated by Swimmy Minami of Bizreach:

Youngme Moon, the dean of Harvard Business School’s MBA program
Dennis Yang, president and ~~CEO~~ COO of Udemy [1]
Jun Murai, dean/professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

Youngme opened by discussing what pointing out that most areas in our lives have been vastly changed by technology, but yet education remains relatively the same.

If you compare learning years ago, and learning today, it continues to be very tedious and very uninspiring. When it comes to education, the audience is essentially captive and the teacher has little incentive to be very engaging. It is remarkably easy to get away with being a boring teacher. You just need to be an information delivery system […] and the student’s their job to absorb it. Does the system work? Sort of. But it is deeply flawed. ¶

She points to the example of MIT’s electrical circuits course, which is free online. Last year 150,000 signed up, and a year later only 5% remained. That dropout rate for online courses is typical, she said. Most of them are simple imformation delivery systems, very much like what we have offline. And for that reason, they aren’t very innovative at all. But yet she is optimistic.

These courses which are the exception to the rule are somehow managing to figure out how to make education more engaging and more immersive than ever. So I believe the real breakthough in online learning is yet to come. ¶

Dennis Yang gave a brief introduction to his Udemy service, pointing out that in addition to delivering education to students, there is also the capability to enable more potential teachers, as opposed to just existing teachers:

At Udemy we believe that there are great teachers outside the walls of academic institutions. It could be a boss, a mentor, or a coach, and we’d like to give them a platform to teach students all around the world. I think most people identify with themselves as a student, but I encourage people to try to think of themselves as a potential teacher. ¶

Dennis admitted that while many of the courses on Udemy skew heavily towards technological skills, that’s a reflection of the interests of the early adopters. But the platform has many new niche topics that they didn’t expect to see, such as how to pass the written exam for being a fire fighter. He says that he expects online education to continue to broaden in this way.

Jun Mirai added that there was an opportunity to make classes fit better through the use of the internet:

We all know about MOOCs these days. But one characteristic of the internet is personalization. So a matching mechanism could be [an interesting development in this space]. ¶

He also discussed the possibility of using online courses as a supplement to offline classes, noting that he is actually doing this at Keio University in his own class:

[For certain information] I tell my students, go check out the MOOC. I’m going to talk about different things in class. I think in this way I can then use the classroom in a more exciting way. ¶

I initially, and mistakenly, had Dennis as the president and CEO of Udemy. That’s incorrect of course, as he is the president and COO. Thanks to one of our readers for pointing this out! ↩

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Ben Silbermann talks about using Pinterest to showcase the best of Japan

Rick Martin 2014.04.09

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. Ben Silbermann, the CEO and founder of Pinterest, appeared at the New Economy Summit for the second year in a row (see his comments from last year here). He noted that this was his third trip to Tokyo, which surprised me, because the company – in which Rakuten has invested – recently rolled out a localized version of its service. He noted that among Pinterest’s billions of pins and millions of collections, that there are a number of people now using their service in interesting ways in Japan Food creator and blogger Masaki Higuchi gets inspiration from Pinterest, and that helps him be creative in his work. Paris Wakana collects ideas for outfit, uses it to plan ideas for travel. Rakuten using Rakuten recipes to share. Silbermann said that each time he comes to Japan, he’s amazed at the culture of art, food, architecture and more. He hopes that people here can continue to use his service to introduce all these cultural elements to the world. Welcoming women During the panel discussion, Ben was asked…

paris-wakana — Japanese Pinner Paris Wakana

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

Ben Silbermann, the CEO and founder of Pinterest, appeared at the New Economy Summit for the second year in a row (see his comments from last year here). He noted that this was his third trip to Tokyo, which surprised me, because the company – in which Rakuten has invested – recently rolled out a localized version of its service.

He noted that among Pinterest’s billions of pins and millions of collections, that there are a number of people now using their service in interesting ways in Japan

Food creator and blogger Masaki Higuchi gets inspiration from Pinterest, and that helps him be creative in his work.
Paris Wakana collects ideas for outfit, uses it to plan ideas for travel.
Rakuten using Rakuten recipes to share.

Silbermann said that each time he comes to Japan, he’s amazed at the culture of art, food, architecture and more. He hopes that people here can continue to use his service to introduce all these cultural elements to the world.

Welcoming women

During the panel discussion, Ben was asked how many executives at his company are women, given how popular Pinterest is among females. He answered:

Many of our senior positions are women. Across the board there are many strong women, and that needs to trickle down the organization. Many women are underrepresented in tech fields. We try to create an environment where gender is a non issue, and that takes some work.

He added that since half of the world are women, they want to create a friendly environment that would welcome anyone from that talent pool.

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Yelp launches in Japan, aspires to be household name by 2020 Olympics

Rick Martin 2014.04.09

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e. Yelp CEO and founder Jeremy Stoppelman spoke at the Japan New Economy Summit today, giving a brief introduction to his service and how it works. Somewhat surprisingly, he announced that Yelp is now available in Japan, and you can find its service online right now at yelp.co.jp as of this morning. During his talk, Jeremy explained that Yelp has about 120 million monthly users, with over 53 million reviews logged. He explained that with over 59% of Yelp searches coming from mobile, that they have truly become a mobile company. Stoppelman says that Yelp wants to be in every country (they are now available in 26 markets), and it has a big challenge ahead in Japan, with services like Tabelog and Cookpad being so dominant already. It will be interesting to see how they fare. He explains: We’ve always taken a one city at a time approach. […] You need high quality local data. You need locals to participate, not just tourists. He said that this process really takes time, but that’s the nature of…

This is a part of our coverage of the Japan New Economy Summit 2014. You can follow our updates on Twitter as well at @thebridge_e.

Yelp CEO and founder Jeremy Stoppelman spoke at the Japan New Economy Summit today, giving a brief introduction to his service and how it works. Somewhat surprisingly, he announced that Yelp is now available in Japan, and you can find its service online right now at yelp.co.jp as of this morning.

During his talk, Jeremy explained that Yelp has about 120 million monthly users, with over 53 million reviews logged. He explained that with over 59% of Yelp searches coming from mobile, that they have truly become a mobile company.

Stoppelman says that Yelp wants to be in every country (they are now available in 26 markets), and it has a big challenge ahead in Japan, with services like Tabelog and Cookpad being so dominant already. It will be interesting to see how they fare. He explains:

We’ve always taken a one city at a time approach. […] You need high quality local data. You need locals to participate, not just tourists.

He said that this process really takes time, but that’s the nature of local. Singapore was their first exploration in Asia, but Jeremy said that they have long known that Japan is a very attractive market.

He cited some friendly nagging from SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff who always asked him “Why aren’t you in Japan?” But he says that on his last few trips it became apparent to him that it would work. He still thinks it will take time, but hopes that by the time the Olympics roll around they can be a household name.

How do you promote innovation within a company? [NES 2014 Panel]

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