Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations

An international panel of academics and professionals from Canada, Japan, Norway and the United States will deliver a presentation titled “Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations” at The 14th Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities (ACAH2023) and The 14th Asian Conference on the Social Sciences (ACSS2023).

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This plenary will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.



Abstract

Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations

This presentation will discuss Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese business organisations, with a focus on the following areas:

  • How the technical skills of business leaders are hindering the implementation of DX in Japan
  • How organisations in Japan are handling the challenge of insufficient IT skills among workers
  • The potential impact of initiatives from Japan's Digital Agency and other government entities on business organisations
  • How domestic and overseas partners motivate Japanese businesses to adopt DX
  • Recommendations for business managers on their next steps

  • Speaker Biography

    William Baber
    Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, Japan

    William Baber, Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, JapanWilliam W. Baber has combined education with business throughout his career. His professional experience has included economic development in the State of Maryland, language services in the Washington, DC area, supporting business starters in Japan, and teaching business students in Japan, Europe, and Canada. He taught English in the Economics and Business Administration Departments of Ritsumeikan University (Japan) before joining the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University where he is Associate Professor in addition to holding courses at the University of Vienna and University of Jyväskylä. His courses include Business Negotiation, Cross Cultural Management, and Management Communication. He is lead author of the 2015 textbook Practical Business Negotiation and conducts research in the areas of negotiation, acculturation, and business models, especially in relation to Japan. He completed his PhD on intercultural adjustment of expatriate workers in Japan in 2016 at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In 2004 he earned a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland (USA) in Instructional Systems Design.


    Anshuman Khare
    Athabasca University, Canada

    Anshuman Khare, Athabasca University, CanadaAnshuman Khare is Professor in Operations Management at Athabasca University, Canada. He joined Athabasca University in January 2000. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and has completed two post-doctoral terms at The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He is also a former Monbusho Scholar, having completed a postdoctoral assignment at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. He has published a number of books and research papers on a wide range of topics. His research focuses on environmental regulation impacts on industry, just-in-time manufacturing, supply chain management, sustainability, cities & climate change, and online business education. He is passionate about online business education. Anshuman served as the Editor of the IAFOR Journal of Business and Management, and is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education published by Emerald and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Applied Management and Technology.


    Kanji Kitamura
    Loyola University, United States and Hawaii Pacific University, United States

    Kanji Kitamura, Loyola University, United States and Hawaii Pacific University, United States


    Kanji Kitamura is an adjunct faculty member at Hawaii Pacific University and Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on international business and Japanese culture, literature, and language. He is also a PhD candidate at Monash University. With over 20 years of experience in corporate banking, Kanji worked as a bank manager for the former Mitsui Bank in Japan and MUFG Financial Group in the USA. His previous roles involved supervising a team of credit analysts that managed large credit portfolios exceeding $10 billion in assets, consisting of multinational corporations such as Toyota Motor North America, American Honda Motor, Nissan North America, Panasonic, and Sony Entertainment.

    Kanji's academic interests revolve around comparative studies of Japan and related areas, including corporate finance within a real-world context, credit analysis primarily of multinational corporations, international business with an emphasis on cross-cultural studies, intercultural communication, and translation studies. He favours qualitative approaches to reveal the unknown, although he has had experience with number-crunching professional duties.


    Yuko Onozaka
    University of Stavanger, Norway

    Yuko Onozaka, University of Stavanger, NorwayYuko Onozaka is a Professor of Market Analysis in the Department of Economics and Finance at the UiS Business School, University of Stavanger, Norway. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and worked at Colorado State University before joining the University of Stavanger in 2008. Her research covers a wide range of topics, including choice modelling, food and sustainability marketing, quantitative textual analysis, machine learning, and family and labour economics. Her work has been published in highly regarded international scholarly journals such as the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy, and Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. She also holds an adjunct professor position at Doshisha University in Japan since 2021.

    Her multinational and multicultural experiences profoundly influenced her current research interests in the intersection of economics, gender, and organisation. Her research, investigating how social gender norms impact the household division of labour in Norway, has been published in Social Forces, and her work on how gender composition influences business committees in Human Relations.

    In addition to her academic research, she actively disseminates her unique perspective on gender and Nordic culture to a broader Japanese audience, including popular media outlets such as Newsweek Japan and NewsPicks.



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