Technology and Innovation: South Korea and Japan 2024
Course description
Innovation is the primary driver of growth and sustainable competitive advantage for firms and, thus, a core concern of top executives worldwide. How can managers build organizations that continuously bring successful technological innovations to market? How do you design an innovation strategy, and how do you execute it? How does the business and national context influence innovation? What is the leading thinking on innovation? To succeed, any manager and entrepreneur should understand these strategic and implementation issues. Moreover, as businesses become increasingly global, they need to understand--and know how to deal with--regional and international business issues.
This course is designed to equip you with a deeper understanding of these issues, with a particular focus on the Asian nations of Japan and South Korea. We will study the opportunities and challenges in the innovation space and pursue an understanding of their history and the roles of culture, society, and governments in their businesses' success.
Japan and South Korea are among the top ten economies in the world and are leading in several advanced technologies, including electronics, robotics, shipbuilding, and vehicles. Their success comes despite their poor economic situation a few decades ago, limited natural resources, low population, and long distance from global trade routes. In this course, we will explore how they achieved such feat and the challenges to sustain their positions. During our in-country trip, we will meet senior business leaders and government officials and visit factories and innovation centers while exploring some cultural and business sites that illustrate the richness of the cultures.
Itinerary
Syllabus
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Faculty and advisor bios
Faculty bio
Maria Ibanez is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She received her doctorate in Technology and Operations Management from Harvard Business School.
She specializes inworker discretion—freedom to decide which tasks to work on, when, and how. Her research investigates how to create the conditions that promote desirable exercise of discretion. From a practical perspective, her research focuses on improving performance by designing data-driven systems that lead individuals to exercise discretion in ways that increase their productivity and work quality. Her work spans archival big data and field experiments in contexts ranging from radiology to restaurant inspections and emergency departments. With a primary focus on healthcare, she collaborates with organizations to understand their work and develop implementable solutions for relevant challenges. Combining operations management with economic theory and the psychology of decision-making, she analyzes large-scale field data to identify causal relationships that generate new insights regarding the connections between operational factors, decision-making, and performance.
Professor Ibanez's research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science and has also been featured in popular press outlets, including The Economist, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review.