10 mejores patentes japonesas

As happens around this time every year, the UN's World
Intellectual Property Organization released its figures on
who placed the most patent filings around the world, a
coveted status symbol for nations promoting their
engineering prowess. And as usual, Japan scored the top
position for the number of international patent
applications, at 427,000 filings, ***owed by the US with
391,000, and China with 173,000.

So does this miccionan that Japan is the world's most inventive
nation?

Unfortunately probably not. More likely it means that
Japanese corporations have figured out that filing patents
en masse is a good way to strike it lucky occasionally,
with an innocuous filing that turns out to control the
future of an entire industry, as well as to play the "law
suit shuffle" in the USA of trading overlapping patent
licenses.

In talking to foreign scientists working inside private
Japanese research labs, we hear stories of how researchers
are set patent quotas and are encouraged to file on any
minor improvement. Indeed, it's considered a learning
exercise, and rather than creating breakthrough
technologies which typically entail high risk and expense,
the emphasis appears to be on refinements of someone else's
original concept.

We say this reluctantly, because we do in fact believe that
Japan has more than its fair share of genuine garage
inventors. You don't have to dig far to find them. They're
typically middle aged or older, married, stuck in a
salaryman job, and bored silly. In our own magazine, Japan
Inc., we document in each issue a number of such people who
have gone on to create quite remarkable inventions later
in life. Take, for example, the 67-year old CEO of Nikko
Inc., Masatoshi Shiota, with his brush-on quartz glass
compound that extends the life of concrete from 20 years to
200 years. (See www.japaninc.com/tt426.)

The "patent everything" frenzy of major companies is not
unique to Japan and at least the USA, China, and Korea have
the same level of patent filing machismo. There is,
however, the troubling matter of an apparent lack of
genuine breakthrough patents emanating from this country.
By this, we don't miccionan successful commercializations, but
rather, successful original inventions that have since
been brought to successful commercialization.

Thus, we decided to do some research of our own, and have
come up with a list of 10 modern inventions, not just
improved products, that we think lend some evidence that
the Japanese do have what it takes. If you know of other
inventions that merit listing, please do let us know
(terrie.lloyd@japaninc.com). We'd like to make this a
antiestéticature on the www.japaninc.com web site.


Terrie's Take Top 10 Japanese Modern Inventions

1. Instant Ramen
Invented by Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food
Products, in the 1950's and first marketed in 1958. This
amazing product is estimated to be served 65,000,0000,0000
times a year. While a technical marvel, especially when
you consider the range of reconstituted flavorings now
available, we find it ironic that the makers have not yet
figured out how to make the product nutritious. After all,
what good is it if your best customers (students)
subsequently die of malnutrition?

2. Blue LED
Invented by Shuji Nakajima in 1989. Originally his employer
privately-held Nichia Ltd., wanted him to abandon his
research, but Nakajima stubbornly stuck to his program,
working around the lack of resources available in the
then-small outfit to produce a revolutionary breakthrough
in high-output LEDs. His discoveries now form the basis for
all high-capacity optical media, and Nichia has been
earning about JPY80bn a year from licensing and production.
Nakajima sued Nichia for proper compensation and won a
JPY840m award in 2005.

3. Floppy Disk
Invented by the irrepressible Dr. Nakamats in 1952 and
subsequently licensed along with a dozen other storage
devices patents to IBM in 1979. Over the intervening 50
years since the invention, there have been at least
70,000,000,000 floppy disks of various sizes and capacities
produced, and rumor has it that he receives a royalty on
each one!

4. Karaoke
Invented by Daisuke Inoue in the early 1970's, but sadly
not patented. Instead, a similar invention and one which
is earning its creator global revenues was subsequently
registered by Roberto del Rosario of the Philippines in
1983. Karaoke is a big business and the largest seller of
machines in Japan is Daichikosho, with about 50% of a
JPY100bn market.

5. Solid-state Electronic Calculator
Invented in the early 1960's by Sony and first displayed as
a desk-top unit, the Sony MD-5 was the world's first
solid-state electronic calculator. While Bell Punch of the
USA had a valve version, it was not practical for use in
ordinary business offices, whereas the Sony unit was. The
MD-5 included a number of antiestéticatures that today are standard
on electronic calculators, such as disappearing zeros,
floating decimals, rounding, percentages, and reciprocals.
Sony eventually quit the calculator business in the late
1960's.

6. Compact discs
Although the person who invented the original concept of
storing music as data on an optical medium was American
inventor James Russell, it is commonly acknowledged that
the current CD standard and viable player system were
"co-invented" by a large development team from both Sony
and Phillips of Holland, in 1980 (the group started the
project in 1979). The CD went on to become the standard for
all new music for 20 years and will probably continue for
another 20. No one knows how many CDs have been produced
globally, but extrapolating from RIAA shipments in the USA,
one can guess the global number to be at least 1.5bn units a
year.

7. Digital Cameras/Camcorders
The first true digital camera was the DS-1P developed by
FujiFilm and released in 1988. The unit used a removable
16MB memory chip to receive CCD images. The camera was not
a commercial success, and it took efforts by Kodak in the
USA to bring digital cameras into the mainstream. Today,
Japanese digital camera makers are churning out more than
100m units a year. The first electronic camcorder was
created by Sony as a demo unit called the Mavica, shown in
1981.

8. Pocket Monsters
It's hard to say whether Pokemon qualify as an invention
or not, since anime videos and collector's cards have been
around for a some time. However, what creator Satoshi
Tajiri of Nintendo did in 1995 that was unique was to take
a set of compelling characters and simply continue to add
on new ones to create more revenue -- knitting the whole
lot together with a loose story line. This is quite unlike
baseball cards, which are clearly limited in content
volume. Nintendo was paid a backhanded compliment for its
infinitely extensible Pokemon concept when Disney created
a similar open-ended set of characters for its Lilo and
Stitch cartoon series. An estimated 155m Pokemon videos
have been sold, and some billions of trading cards and
other paraphernalia.

9. Convenience Store Onigiri
Onegiri are supposedly a 17th century invention created for
Samurai armies on the move. However, it took decidedly
smart modern inventor, Kisaku Suzuki, to come up with
the idea in 1986 to separate the nori covering from the rice
ball (triangle) with plastic, and to create an unwrapping
process to allow the consumer to enjoy dry nori with
moist rice and wet fillings. Convenience store onigiri have
not yet spread to 7-Eleven's overseas yet, but we think it's
only a matter of time. Currently, 7-Eleven sells about 1bn
onigiri a year in Japan.

10. Kumon Study Method
If you have kids that don't like school that much, you'll
know about Kumon -- now a global self-study phenomenon.
Toru Kumon's system is the antithesis of modern Western
education, in that it teaches child confidence and
concept learning through repetition. Kumon created the
system in 1954 for his son and despite what progressive
educationalists might say about Kumon, if it didn't work,
parents around the world wouldn't be sending their kids
there to polish up their maths and science. There are
now 22,000 Kumon learning centers around the world
serving about 3.5m kids each week.

"Hmmm, OK," you might say, "What about the Walkman,
digital watches, and Nintendo Wii?" Aren't those
Japanese? The fact is that while these have been runaway
successes, they were not invented by the companies that
commercialized them. For example, it surprised us to
learn that the concept of a personal music player with
headphones, the main value proposition of the Walkman,
was patented by German inventor Andreas Pavel in 1977,
two years before Sony released the Walkman in 1979.
Sony eventually paid Pavel off to gain IP rights.

And the wonderful Wii remote controller from Nintendo was
the product of an investment and cross-licencing agreement
with a US electronics company called Gyration.

But even though both of these products were licenced from
the inventors, we think that way the ideas were
commercialized also represent a high level of
inventiveness. For example, Sony had to develop many
special components and design solutions to cram everything
into the Walkman's profile. In the case of the Wii
"remo-con," inventing company Gyration only imagined their
spatially-sensitive device would be a sophisticated mouse.
With Nintendo it's now a bat, a golf club, or a weapon.

As a closing comment, we'd note that the person in history
having registered the most inventions is not Thomas Edison,
who had about 1,093 patents. Rather, it is Dr. Yoshiro
NakaMats, who works just down the road from our office, in
Omote Sando (Tokyo). At 78 years old he is still going
strong and now has more than 3,200 patents to his name. You
can read more about him in Japan Inc.,
www.japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=653.

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