Jan 29 - Feb 5, 1998

Dear Friends and colleagues:

Hello, I'm Jim Johnson, the US coordinator for the Nikkei Net Conference. Among other things, I serve as deputy director for the Global Information Infrastructure Commission, which is a co-sponsor of this project.

May I join Waichi Sekiguchi and Nikkei in welcoming you to the first Nikkei sponsored global Net Conference. This is an experiment in global conversation, and we very much appreciate your willingness to express you thoughts about the three topical areas that have been identified: Asia and the information age; electronic commerce; and the Network society.

I nominated many of you to particpate because I know you have some very interesting thoughts which have arisen out of very important experiences. Your ideas will become the basis for further discussion at the Nikkei Global Information Summit on March 10 in Tokyo. And we hope that this conversation will continue.

As you may know there is a simultaneous conversation among our Japanese speaking colleagues, and one among English speakers. If you are bi-lingual we invite you to join in both.

As a starting point, one of our colleagues, Ernest Wilson of the University of Maryland has suggested that, 'Experience in private firms, NGOs and government shows conclusively that the critical elements to successful use of IT is not the IT, but the LEADERSHIP, VISION AND THE INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES necessary to apply the most appropriate technologies to societal needs.'

What do you think? Are we really facing a global revolution? Is information technology going to have such a dramatic impact on our world? Or can this be managed as a transitional change which becomes absorbed into various aspects of our lives, like the telephone or television did? How do we balance the call for LEADERSHIP with the idea that the NET is a grass roots movement with lots of nodes, but no apex?

Let's hear from you.

My name is Jiro KOKURYO, an associate professor of Keio Business School in Yokohama, Japan.

I maintain an entry point for foreign researchers of electronic commerce wishing to find out about the status of EC in Japan.

Electronic Commerce Research Project (English version)
http://www.kbs.keio.ac.jp/kokuryolab/ecrp_e/ecrp_e.html

Let me know if you have suggestions on what we should include in the site.

Following are two of my recent works in English:

1. The Role of Customer-to-Customer Interaction on Computer Networks

Discusses how interaction among customers of products is becoming increasingly important in the electronic society.
http://www.kbs.keio.ac.jp/kokuryolab/papers/1997002/c-c.htm

2. Information Technologies and the Transformation of Japanese Industry

Analysis of how and why Japan lagged in the adoption of open systems and how it is preparing to come back.
http://www.kbs.keio.ac.jp/kokuryolab/papers/1997003/pacis97.htm

I think the papers address the question that Jim Johnson provided us. I do not know of the world, but there is certainly a lot going on in Japan.

The themes I would like to discuss are:
- quantity and quality of information: the art to separate relevant from irrelevant information? What are the necessary competencies? What happens in our brain?
- What is IT? Former, today, tomorrow?
- IT/Internet and generations?
- Does Electronic Commerce satisfy human needs?
- Who will earn money in the information society?
- Who is afraid of the digital backlash?
- Economics: Information as the fourth production factor next to labor, capital and natural resources.
- The role of external information for companies
- How far is Europe concerning Electronic Commerce in comparison to the USA and Japan? Is Europe still sleeping?
- How can developing countries profit from the global information society?

And here my first comments to Jim's questions:

I dont't know if it is a global revolution or a transitional change. Both, the telephone and the TV had deep influence on economies, cultures and societies - regional, national and global. We can learn from the experiences made in the time shortly after their invention. Napoleon was the first who used electronic media (telegraph) to lead a war. He won the war with the help of fast information transmitted by the telegraph because he had competitive advantages. The telegraph (the first Internet in the 19th Century) for example was the starting point for finance, bank and the global capital market. It was the first opportunity to send money by electronic transition from one point to a another point thousand of kilometres away without sending a horse or a ship. Today - 100 years later - we are using the same principle of technology. But in a few years/month we will send money by email. Was the telegraph a revolution or a transitional change? Is Electronic Commerce a revolution or a transitional change? I don't know.

>How do we balance the call for LEADERSHIP with the idea
>that the NET is a grass roots movement with lots of nodes,
>but no apex?

I think that there is the problem that there is no balance between the complex technologies and the human needs. Not everything what is possible in technologies catches on in the market. Some innovations are to complex. The new tasks are not technological they are social. The Internet is the change of the traditional hierarchical (?) national society to a cooperative global Net-Culture. The raw material knowledge needs a new kind of LEADERSHIP: A LEADERSHIP by Networking.

Best regards from Bonn, Germany

E-commerce colleagues:

We have heard from two experts on the topics as they relate to electronic commerce. Thank you Kokuryo-san for your reference to your website and the papers you have prepared. This gives us good insight into what is happening in Japan

From Germany, Wolfgang Hennes opens a good question on the issue of how to tell the difference between valuable information and irrelevant information. How to manage what can become a flood of data?

For the global marketplace, the cyber market, how does data get translated into something of economic value?

What do you all think. Let's hear from you.