“I spoke to the company Hitachi, who were making the professional Geiger counters at the time. They weren’t interested because the target audience for this product was very different from the target audience they had.” When talking to companies, he was sometimes outside within three minutes.
According to Ishigaki, this symbolizes what is currently going wrong with innovation in Japan. “Japanese companies have become too big. Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi. They no longer look at small innovations. They see small innovations as waste, and it is not worth investing in them.”
In the early 1990s, Japan was still producing about half of all computer chips worldwide. That percentage has fallen to 6 percent, according to IC Insights. South Korea is now also rushing past Japan. The technological standard now seems to be set by the US, China and South Korea. Not by Japan.
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