KEIO SFC JOURNAL Vol.6 No.1 Issues on Service Innovations

Innovation in the service industry, or service innovation shortly, becomes important in many countries, including Japan. Among many talks about service innovation, IBM's proposal on "service science" and the University of Tokyo's initiative on "service engineering" are worthy consideration. The case-based discussion suggests Japan's high potential in service innovation.

Low productivity of service industry of Japan has been a key issue for many years. Recently, however, many start-ups of various kinds of service industry are creating interesting business model using ICT, and they are both creating new market and stealing conventional large corporations' current market. These start-ups are gathering various kinds of customer data second by second everyday in a web 2.0 environment, and they are ready to fully utilize the huge data base with scientific methods. Service productivity of Japan may improve when big corporations are forced to follow the start-ups' methods in service industry.

Although many kinds of innovations have improved and popularize sport, it does not mean that the Japanese sport industry has always grown. The disincentives are such Japanese own values in sport as identifying sport with physical education, integrating sport and martial arts, and deifying discrimination known as amateurism. The J-League changed those Japanese values, and the J-League's systems and activities crashed false reality in the Japanese sport industry. Therefore, the J-League is regarded as the greatest innovation in the history of the Japanese sport industry.

This paper first discusses about 1995 Annual Report on Health and Welfare, which shows the healthcare publicly acknowledges as "service". According to the report, about 60 percent of Japanese has described that "healthcare was service business" and already been on the growing phase in the service business. Secondary, the discussion proceeds to the essential qualities and characteristics of service. It mentions about the intangible properties, emphasis on "Moments of Truth", simultaneity of production and consumption, and joint production with clients, by applying the concept of service to the healthcare. Finally the paper discusses about the innovation in healthcare service based on the social driving force and emphasizes the renovation of customer relationships.

This is an experimental study based on the data from Research-Q, a web survey on the quality of TV programs. First, I divided all variety / information programs into layers and quantitatively identified the life-stage of each program. Second, time-series examination was performed on these programs. Finally, the result explained that there are three program-life-cycle patterns in general. The uniqueness of this research is that it refers to The Long Tail and deals with extremely low rating programs being broadcast at midnight. In recent years, it has become popular among key commercial stations to move midnight programs to golden hour. Therefore, I focused on these cases and investigated some success factors based on the diffusion theory and The Chasm.

This research concerns the norms regarding bicycle traffic networks and bicycle traffic signs in Germany and their application to the bicycle traffic network introduced in Rhineland-Palatinate. In 2000, this federal state seriously started planning and implementing its bicycle traffic network of approx. 700km of everyday routes and recreational routes. Some of these routes are still under construction. In order to achieve uniform bicycle traffic signs in the whole area, Rhineland-Palatinate compiled its own design guidelines in 2004. Town and village councils are responsible for building bicycle paths and erecting bicycle traffic signs.

This paper aims to analyze the increasing use of strategic news frame in political news coverage. The "strategic news frame" refers to the cynical trend in news reports focusing on the personal interest of politicians and their campaign strategies rather than the policy of their parties. By applying the tools of content analysis - focus, tone, and content - the increase in the strategic frame of political news coverage by the Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun is analyzed. The result of the analysis was that from 1980 to 2000 the focus in political news coverage shifted from general policies and agenda to the politicians and an increasing trend in strategic news frames could be noted. These two characteristics are seen as the cause of the raise in political cynicism of the general public in Japan.

Getting the profit from innovations is critical for firms to grow. The past research has investigated the inter-industry differences of innovators' profitability, and yet the intra-industry difference remains to be explained. This paper tries to explain the intra-industry difference of the profitability by taking the inkjet printer industry as the case. Especially, the robust nature of Canon's profitability in this particular industry is the focal point. The paper suggests that Canon has controlled its profitability by selecting certain architecture of the product design, and that the conceptual framework developed here is useful.

This paper proposes a new theory of communication incorporating next generation media and its application to English education at the university level. Recently in Japan, need for so-called communicative English education is growing stronger, in correspondence with which there have been some interesting theories of communication. However, such theories are far from being functionally adequate, because they are confined to language alone without realizing the limitation of the role of language in communication. This paper attempts to correct these existing theoretical frameworks for a more functional model of communication. There are several important issues highlighted in this paper including "meta-communicative dimension", which is considered essential for the conceptualization of communication thus defined.

The rapid progress of Internet has hastened the evolution of English into the standard language "-the international language-" for the international community. Japanese people need to catch and response the English information on the net correctly and quickly. However, the English proficiency of Japanese college students is generally poor. Japanese students tend to read each sentence more than once. This repetition slows reading speed and reduces the amount of reading. And so, we require an improved training method for brushing up their English ability. We are conducting research on reading with chunking method from top to bottom. We developed a software with chunking method, and we evaluated it at a Japanese college. We observed that chunking method of this software appears to be a promising method for stopping repetition and improving reading.

Mental care has been regarded as important for decades. Liaison psychiatric clinical nurse specialists intervenes in mental problems of patients and nurses with extensive professional knowledge and skills, but there are only 39 liaison psychiatric clinical nurse specialists in Japan. We constructed a trial remote consultation system for hospitals using the Internet. We investigated the feasibility of expanding the consultation system all over the country. Four important points became clear: (1)there is a great demand for the remote consultation system, (2)Intranet systems are already commonly used in hospitals, (3)many users feel uneasy about Internet security, and (4)most hospitals lack the structural conditions necessary for the remote consultation system.