Takahiro FUJIMOTO

Professor of the Faculty of Economics at University of Tokyo and Executive Director of Manufacturing Management Research Center (MMRC)
Séjour de recherche à l’IAO : du 1er novembre 2016 au 31 mars 2017
Courriel : fujimoto[at]e.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Photo_Fujimoto
Takahiro FUJIMOTO

Présentation/Profile

Takahiro FUJIMOTO, Fellow at the Lyon Collegium Institute for Advanced Studies, is Associate Researcher at IAO (2016 November 1st-2017 March 31th).

Professor of the Faculty of Economics at University of Tokyo and Executive Director of Manufacturing Management Research Center (MMRC), he is also Faculty Fellow of RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry), and Senior Research Associate at Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology and operations management.

Fujimoto graduated from Tokyo University and joined Mitsubishi Research Institute in 1979. He received doctoral degree from Harvard Business School in 1989. Fujimoto’s main publications in English include : Competing to Be Really, REALLY Good (2007), The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota (1999) for which he received the Imperial Award and the Japan Academy Prize (both 2002), and Product Development Performance : Strategy, Organization, and Management in the World Auto Industry (1991) with Kim B. Clark.

Diplôme(s)/Degree(s)

D.B.A (Doctor of Business Administration) Harvard University, USA (1989)
B.A. (Economics) The University of Tokyo, Japan (1979)

Spécialité/Discipline

Technology and Operations Management
Evolutionary Economics

Projets de recherche

His long-term research objectives have been technology and operation management. More specifically, in three areas : production management, product development, and suppliers management. In production management, he has made functional and evolutionary analyses of the so-called Toyota-style manufacturing system and study firms’ organizational capabilities in manufacturing. In product development, he has studied impacts of three-dimensional CAD (digital information technologies) on lead time reduction, as well as inter-industrial comparison of effective product development, Evolution of product-process architectures, interactions of manufacturing-service knowledge. In suppliers’ management, he has empirically investigated key properties of the Japanese suppliers system and their institutional complementarity, as well as historical implication of black box parts and modularization.

Objectif/Purpose of stay

His current research is entitled : Co-Evolution of Capability and Architecture -A Comparative Study of European and East Asian Manufacturing Industries- The purpose of the project is to explore the dynamic interaction of capability building and architectural changes in the global manufacturing industries based on the evolutionary theories of social sciences. Geographically, the project focuses mostly on EU countries (e.g., France, Germany, UK) and East Asian Counties (e.g., Japan, China, Korea). Industrially, the main focus is the automobile industry, but other machinery industries and process industries will be investigated. Considering that the research theme of the proposed project is exploratory, it will rely much on comparative case studies, including site visits and interviews and on-the-spot data collection.

Curriculum Vitae

CV Takahiro Fujimoto (English version)