ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the features of Japanese industry that encourage collaboration. It suggests that while vertical collaboration is common, and is characterized by close integration of firms enjoying high levels of trust, horizontal collaboration is typified by many of the tensions between cooperativeness and competition. Cooperative research is common in Japan. There are, for example, over fifty collaborative engineering research associations working in a range of technologies. Heaton describes a 1985 survey by the Japan Fair Trading Commission which found that 55 per cent of 250 leading firms participated in cooperative research. Japanese firms tend to train their scientists and engineers on-the-job in ways that extend the development of in-house capabilities and specialist, firm-specific knowledge in established technologies and business areas. Technological collaboration has been encouraged by consistent public policy. That is, firms enter collaborative programmes in the expectation of future programmes which they may value particularly highly.
