TOKYO – Japan Inc. where companies with roots going back decades, if not centuries, have long dominated, is finally warming up to startups.
Major banks and venture capitalists are keen to tap into faster growth by investing in innovative entrepreneurs, when they can find them. Money raised for ventures in Japan reached a record 276 billion yen ($2.5 billion) last year.
That’s up from about 50 billion yen ($450 million) annually after the financial crisis, according to Japan Venture Research Co.
OPEN FIELDS
Silicon Valley still raises 50 times more cash for startups than Japan, but the number of U.S. startups chasing that cash is higher. So there’s relatively more money to go around in Japan, where young, daring risk-takers are still relatively scarce.
That helps startups to survive, says Yusuke Asakura, who heads a Tokyo-based angel network of entrepreneurs.
Still, he says Japan needs a change of “mindset.”
“Japanese value hard work, but what creates innovation is not keeping at the hard work but deciding it is too much work and figuring out how not to do it,” said Asakura, who led a turnaround as chief executive at Mixi, a social networking service in Japan.
He now sits on boards of two startups – Raksul, an online service that farms printing work out to plants nationwide, and digital hotel reservation service Loco Partners, which recently was bought by Japanese telecoms operator KDDI.
“There is potential for startups in all the old-fashioned sectors,” he said, pointing to growing use of digital tools in education and home-remodeling. “Creating a totally new sector is one way. But there are many old areas that need fixing.”
COOL STETHOSCOPE
Arata Ohwa did exactly that: Innovating in an area where practically nothing had changed for decades.
His Tokyo-based startup Classico sells stylish lab coats and scrub tops online to doctors and nurses around the world, especially in the U.S. and Japan. Classico coats cost about $200 each, about seven times more than utilitarian conventional ones, but are more fashionable.
More recently, Ohwa raised seed money through crowd funding to begin designing, making and selling ergonomic stethoscopes that sell from $380 to $520 apiece.
Classico’s U Scope is made of a more pliant material than traditional stethoscopes, whose basic design has been the same for a century.
It can be rolled up to fit…