An initiative aimed at supporting international web / mobile brands grow in Japan, and developing Japanese growth hacking talent

I was recently interviewed for a Japanese creative industry magazine “Project Design” to talk about the relevance of “Growth Hacking” (Japanese article here), the approach to growing web and mobile startups that has come to prominence in recent years, to established and non-web businesses. I was interviewed in Japanese, but wrote up the main threads of the conversation in English below.

First of all though some context. Why was I being interviewed about Growth Hacking? I have been a involved a lot with startups one way or another. I have had numerous startups as clients over the years, companies with a good product-market-fit for Japan for whom my company has effectively been the growth team for the Japan market. Also through my role as a mentor for 500 Startups, Silicon Valley’s top accelerator program, where I offer advice to founders and growth hackers on how to grow in in particular, but anywhere for that matter. I also run Growth Hacking Japan University, a 7 week lecture course in Japanese that I have run twice now, and plan to run again soon, teaching growth hacking techniques and strategies to Japanese founders and aspiring growth hackers, and learning a lot from the participants at the same time.

Most of the time I work with bigger established brands, including cloud tech companies and web services, for whom we (Profero Tokyo) position ourselves as “the performance engine” that drives incremental results in one or a combination of marketing areas. I would not describe this work as “growth hacking” per se, but being so focused on KPIs and striving to create operational efficiencies, actually the work has a lot in common with what a growth team in a web startup would be doing, and this is recognised by several of our client partners. Ginger-Software, the disruptive native English writing technology, founded in Israel, is one brand for whom we fulfil this role in Japan.

At Profero Tokyo we are very conscious of the hybrid team we bring to each brand partner, the skill sets that combine when our specialists work together to create additional value, both through coming up with ideas that cross disciplines, as well as synergies that drive efficiencies for our clients, and in this sense we have embraced the growth hacking philosophy.

Here are my notes from the interview:

++++++++++++++++++++++

Growth hacking can inform the philosophy, techniques and most importantly the hybrid teams that established companies should bring to new business models.

Growth hacking needs an agile environment

The whole point of Growth Hacking is to grow a new business model as quickly as possible. That objective is shared by many established companies when they start a new business division or launch new products, so in principle there is nothing stopping big companies from “growth hacking”. However, growth hacking works best in the purest sense when nothing is held sacred, allowing the product-market fit to be established without constraints, such as “brand XXX’s target are always YYYY type of consumers”. Nurturing this sort of agility into the culture and environment of a big company is very hard to do, hence why companies tend to become less innovative as they get bigger.

One way of looking at what changes when you go from a small agile startup to a big established company with many stakeholders, existing customers and partners, is to think in terms of where the efficiencies are coming from, since all business models need to be creating efficiencies of scale of some kind or another if they are to grow.

In small companies with very little baggage and a small cohesive team internal efficiencies should be off the chart, but because the business model has no scale yet in the market, it enjoys minimal external efficiencies. As companies grow and gain momentum in their market they go through a tipping point beyond which they have broad awareness among their audience, people know what to expect, they can enjoy economies of scale when purchasing, and in general external efficiencies get better. But at the same time they tend to become more complex internally with multiple management levels, physical and social distance between employees in different departments, more complicated decision making processes and more friction in general.

So a lack of agility within some big companies would likely prevent a growth hacking type model to whir within it. But in its purest ‘bootstrapping’ sense growth hacking is not always necessary or the most efficient route to success anyway. Where a new business division can leverage the strength of established business models and a symbiotic ecosystem can be created, such as Apple succeeded in doing across its hardware and software business, then that is the quickest route to success, and Growth Hacking doctrine would demand that that is the route taken. iTunes was never a standalone music store. The App Store only exists because of Apple’s mobile hardware. Building out an consumer ecosystem in a pre-planned way can be the right approach, provided you get the strategy spot on.

Having said that, I remember reading an interview many years ago I think after the iPod took off, in which Steve Jobs said that his main role was insulating his R&D team from being influenced by the commercial influences elsewhere in the business, nurturing a free-thinking environment for a group of super smart product designers and developers. Everyone knows what happened after that. Although I would not call Apple’s astounding run of innovation growth hacking, creating a free thinking context in which experiment can happen and a tight team can work fervently together is I believe also necessary for the growth hacking scenario.

Rapid Prototyping cycles for product-market fit

So when is Growth Hacking relevant and possible for big businesses? At its heart Growth Hacking is an ongoing series of experiments, each one built on the intelligence gained from the those than ran before it. This is essentially iterative prototyping, a concept that is no way a new idea for big companies, but in the case of web startups they are doing it in public, or to anyone who will pay attention, and getting feedback directly to tune the product and the marketing mechanics at the same time. For many reasons not least the desire to keep new developments unseen from competitors, it is harder for big companies to do this process in the open.

The iterative method is founded on data. If there is no way to capture the performance of the product as data and use that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the product and market it better then forget the Growth Hacking idea. It’s something else at that point. This may well limit true growth hacking to web and mobile companies where the products are literally plugged into the market itself, but I am open minded on this point. All kinds of products are getting hooked into the internet-of-things now, and reporting performance data back to engineers and designers. Either way it does not stop other companies from using the ideas and approaches that are bound up with growth hacking.

Implicit in the argument above is the assumption that the marketing model and the product experience can co-evolve together. Often when companies get big and established one ends up downstream of the other. In many growth-hacked web services these days, the user experience itself comprises viral mechanisms that bring other users in, so that the product does its own marketing. Even if the viral effects are not wired into the product in this way, the product and the way it is distributed needs to allow for really short prototyping cycles. This principle is something that big companies could learn from, or at least aspire to this ideal, since often they place marketing downstream of R&D, which can end up in the miserable scenario of trying to sell products that are unsellable.

Connect customers & growth team directly

Spelling this principle out in terms of the people involved, the ideal is to short cut the feedback loop between those designing and creating the product and its ultimate customers as much as possible. The word “growth hacking” feels very cold and technical, not really the ‘human insight based thinking’ that we like to boast about in marketing, nor the ‘customer centric culture’ that corporate CEOs work so hard to advocate in their companies. In a way though the growth hacking approach is the MOST customer centric approach there is, provided that the data being collected and used for optimising with actually does represent the value the customers are bringing to your brand and bottom line, in both the short and long term.

Thus the quintessential growth hacking metrics-based process of experimentation and optimisation is in simple terms a way to short cut the ‘prototype > test > iterate’ loop and make it spin as quickly as possible with the least separation between market and product evolution. This efficiency is what underpins the “fastest route to success” philosophy at the heard of the growth hacking movement.

Anyone who has worked in a science laboratory or R&D lab recognises this process, and so in a sense growth hacking start-ups have effectively put the lab at the centre of the business. In too many big businesses not only can the R&D department become a costly appendage, but the scientific approach often loses out to internal politics or other constraints, or else the R&D amounts to just tinkering with existing formats because the bigger vision has been forgotten or become obsolete.

Defining the necessary conditions

So I believe big companies can benefit from growth hacking style approach to growing a new business model, but they have to set up the context to mirror to some extent that of a startup in the following ways:

• It should be run by a few people who “own it”: passionate about the idea and strongly incentivised to make it work, ideally through equity ownership
• These leaders should be given the responsibility to take decisions without committee agreement, leading to forthright decision making and accountability
• Allow risk taking and accept failure as a natural part of the process. Experimentation is needed to hit on the right formula, and you are unlikely to hit on it first time.
• Start off with as few people as possible. The last thing the leaders need is a big team to manage before they know what it is they need to be doing.
• You need to create an efficient, no-fat-on-the-bone base upon which to build out a profitable model. Too much resource early on, either people or money, will lead to inefficiencies that will at worse kill it prematurely, or else get baked into the business and restrict profitability later on.
• Give the business brand-independence, enough for it to be able to tell its own stories and connect to a distinct audience that becomes its early adopter customer base from which an early majority can be recruited.

The importance of a brand narrative

This last point about the need for brand independence is often forgotten I believe, but companies whose founders understand how to grow a brand often take off faster and win big in the long term. This is because they are making the technology mean something more than what its features would imply on their own. In my experience people often forget that the experience people have is fundamentally different depending on what they are looking to get out of it, and this is dependent on how well it is branded and the communications around it. No first time user touches a feature set without preconceptions, so framing this interaction and the ongoing usage is the role of the brand.

Founders and companies with simple, powerful brand identities and compelling ideas around their technology, such as Phil Libin with Evernote’s “remember everything”, or Mark Beniof’s with Salesforce.com death-to-software narrative, are so good at selling their technology story that we forget just what masters they are at branding. Both men had plenty of business experience before founding the companies that made them famous, and it shows.

I would say that successful startups always have a strong “founders story”, a vision to make the world better, core values, that for better or worse get baked into the brand perception from early on. Even if they are not a consumer-facing brand, this narrative is important for getting others excited about its potential, which is always necessary. These stakeholders are the investors, journalists and early hires in tech startups. But the same thing goes for new business models springing off big business, where the equivalents would be the board members, the individuals transferred in or hired into the business as well as the consumers who would adopt the new product.

So although it is very hard to generalise about how business models should get built out, the brand story and how it enables businesses to captivate each subsequent audience as it builds its following is one, and the other is the way the internal team expands.

Growth teams and growth hackers

It is my belief that team structure is the most important area of growth hacking for big or established companies to take note of, not least in starting off slim, but what type of people are brought into the mix.

If we generalise a growth team into specialists and generalist, a room full of generalists is not ideal, but then nor is a room full of specialists, and yet this is often the make up you see.

You definitely need deep vertical expertise. In a web start up you might have an SEM specialist, a PR specialist, a contents marketing / social media specialist and product developer as the first 4 members of a growth team. The challenge is getting these relatively diverse skill sets to work cohesively together so that much needed synergies emerge. It is even harder in big companies where these verticals might already exist as distinct departments, potentially physically separated.

In order to get them working synergistically you need someone who can speak all all their respective lingoes, and who has a sense for the difference between just showing up in that area, and actually driving competitive advantage. Who is that person? It needs to be someone who has themselves dived into these skill sets at one point, not to the extent that they became an expert in all of them, but typically in one area at least.

These multi-skilled individuals are the sort of people who, being quick learners, dive headlong into a knowledge specialism for a while, get to the point where they understand 90% of it, can perceive the nature of expertise in that last 10%, but do not fancy spending the next 3+ years to perfect those skills themselves. And then they move on to another vertical. They get bored as quickly as they get inspired, but rather than being a weakness, it equips them with a rare combination of literacies.

Not T-shaped, but “rake-shaped” talent is key

In management theory they are similar to the T-shaped people, but actually more like a “rake”, or Japanese “kuma–te” meaning “bear’s claw”. You heard it here first! Ideally you can find one of these talents who also has leadership potential, and build the team around them, since they can be the bridge that gets the teams working together efficiently.

These sorts of people are rare and hence very valuable assets, especially if the areas they can bridge between map to the necessary skill sets of your business, and have the communication skills to forge a team spirit. These sorts have been key drivers in the growth of the US silicon valley tech startups, where they are highly prized but they are even rarer in Japan. These people represent the “growth hacker” archetype, and so perhaps more so than “growth hacking” the approach, it is this archetypal skill set that is most important to highlight beyond web and mobile startups.

In Japan deep vertical expertise is celebrated and rewarded. Finding your craft and plugging away at it for a lifetime earns you respect and career progression. This is no bad thing, and Japan’s ongoing success as an economic force is built on this tradition. Japan does not have a shortage of specialist, I believe.

However, the way companies and careers are structured it makes it hard for multi-disciplinary careers to be nurtured within companies, and hence there are not many growth hacker types around, and I believe this is a limiting factor on Japan’s economic success going forward that needs to be addressed.

The post Growth Hacking for brands and how to grow a hybrid team appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The pathfinder corporate hybrid strategy

I predict that by 2020 the Renault-Nissan Alliance will have replaced Toyota as the #1 car maker. Already 8.1m units annually, or 1 in 10 cars sold globally come from the group, which was established in 1999 through an unprecedented cross-shareholding agreement, that left both sides of the alliance incentivised to help the other succeed, without the respective corporate and brand identities being consumed by the other. A key factor in the success of the group over the last decade has been the creation of successful hybrids of the two company’s strengths, where strengths are shared and weaknesses mitigated both ways. For instance, operationally the “Nissan Production Way” was adopted by Renault’s manufacturing facilities, leading to productivity gains of 15% on the French manufacturer’s production lines. Going the other way, in the same way that German makers have helped Toyota by supplying diesel engines for their European models, many of the Nissan cars and vans sold in Europe today have Renault-built diesel engines, helping Nissan become the biggest Japanese brand in many key markets in the continent.

Logistics is another key area of where hybrids of the two companies are paying dividends, working tightly together to create efficiencies across purchasing warehouses, shipping containers, shipping… In logistics alone the annual savings through collaboration amount to $300m. For the group as a whole the an enormous $2bn per year is estimated to have been saved in 2012 through collaboration.

The benefits of partnership do not just work on a global level, but also when they target strategic growth markets. In 2011 the Alliance launched a hybrid  “Brazil Offensive”, investing $1.8bn in local manufacturing facilities establishing a 200k unit annual capacity for Nissan, due to come online in 2014, and for Renault increased capacity to 380k units, a combined total of nearly 600k for this market that will soon become the World’s 3rd biggest overtaking Japan itself. In another BRIC market, Russia, where the group is targeting 40% market share as quickly as possible, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has taken a 67% controlling stake in the biggest local manufacturer AvtoVAZ, and together will expand local manufacturing capacity to 1.7 units annually by 2016. The move, which has been blessed by Putin, also brings the iconic Lada brand under the groups wing, adding it to the growing list of marks in its stable: Renault, Nissan, Infiniti, Dacia, Datsun, Renault Samsung Motors and now Lada.

In a globalised car marketplace where competition is increasingly intense, and car sales are often decided on the loan-purchase and warranty agreements rather than the uniqueness of the vehicles, the big players need all the operational efficiencies and economies of scale they can grab, and there is no doubt that deals as attractive as the AvtoVAZ one would not have been possible without the combined financial grunt of the Alliance behind them. But in such a market genuine technological leadership becomes even more important, as Toyota proved with their hybrid technology.

The Alliances biggest technology play has been the bold investment in electric vehicles, a move that would not have been a viable option without the combined financial strength, nor without the complementary R&D contributions of Renault and Nissan respectively. The Renault Nissan Alliance is leading plugin cars sales with 100,000 since 2010 and is deeply involved in building out the infrastructure to support an EV car culture in developed markets. Whether this will prove to give Renault-Nissan a decisive advantage in the race to the top is yet to be seen, but if EV adoption accelerates they are better placed than any.

If this partnership has been so successfully then why have not others followed suit? Actually they have. Similar deals have been struck between VW & Suzuki, GM and Peugeot and others, but none have been nearly as effective. Why is this? You could point towards Renault and Nissan’s relatively well matched scale and mutual strength, meaning that the relationship could not be too one sided, as was the case with VW and Suzuki’s failed alliance. However, back in 1999 Nissan were on the brink of bankruptcy, so a similar disparity might have evolved in the Renault Nissan Alliance too.

Carlos Ghosn, CEO of both companies and the Alliance itself used the metaphor of a marriage to explain its success:
“A couple does not assume a converged, single identity when they get married. Instead, they retain their own individuality and join to build a life together, united by shared interests and goals, each bringing something different to the union. In business, regardless of the industry, the most successful and enduring partnerships are those created with a respect for identity as the constant guiding principle.”
This mutual respect was reflected in the decision to retain the two distinct corporate HQs in Paris and Yokohama, but establishing a separate headquarters for the Alliance in Amsterdam, on neutral territory as it were, where the two sides can share ideas, technology and work on refining and developing new synergies and strategies.

I am not alone in thinking that at the heart of any innovative organisation is the diversity of its culture. Too many people thinking in the same way and accepted approaches get reinforced. But in hybrid teams everyone has to make an effort to empathise with and understand the alternative ways of thinking, and this leads to original thinking.

This sort of diversity does not have to come from different national cultures, but it is certainly one way of baking such diversity into an organisation. In an another post I speculated as to what would arise from a hybrid of Japanese and Brazilian cultures. In the same way I am intrigued to know how the Japanese and French cultures combine, albeit with many other nations blended in to the multi-national context. Just like all marriages, it probably is not all plane sailing, but if the willingness to make it work is there, then special things can happen.

Japan & Brazil getting closer together

The value of cross cultural hybrids in catalysing innovation is especially relevant to Japan since its society and hence workforce is relatively homogeneous compared to say the US or the UK. In the context of an ageing demographic yet essentially healthy, capital-rich economy I expect many more Japanese corporations in other industries to instigate cross border alliances.

Having just overseen a merger between two companies, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, I know from personal experience that it is the differences between two companies that implies the value of bringing them together, but you need cultural synergies to make it work, and someone who can understand both sides and so nurture the resulting union. In this sense much of the credit for the successful partnership must go to Carlos Ghosn, himself a Brazilian-Lebanese-French multilingual hybrid. His success in bringing Nissan back from the brink has made him a near cult figure in Japanese business, and perhaps one day he will sit on top of the world’s biggest car maker. Already though the world, not least Japan, has a lot to learn from his experiences.

The post Renault-Nissan Alliance is the pathfinder corporate hybrid and can overtake Toyota appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Japan & Brazil getting closer together

Although the stereotypes associated with Japanese and Brazilians are poles apart, the two countries in fact share a special relationship based on the very human ties of historical emigration. Now they are starting to explore the potential of combining the mutual strengths of both nations in the future.

Japan’s is arguably the most “progressed”  society on the planet, demographically more mature than any other, and one of the most advanced in terms of technology, infrastructure, healthcare provision and with a massive, capital intensive economy.

In contrast Brasil (spelt the Portuguese on purpose!) has a young demographic, labour-intensive economy destined to grow into a superpower, but lacks many of the technological and infrastructural know-how that Japan has at its fingertips. Today they are becoming ever closer economic partners as they start to realise the potential to trade knowledge, goods and services, and potentially co-create culture too.

In a previous post concerning hybrid families, I came to the conclusion that “new types of humans” may be unique genetically, but it is the fact that they express a unique combination of two cultures that is probably the more interesting characteristic.

Among the possible cultural hybrids you can imagine, the Japan-Brasil hybrid is, for me at least, one of the most interesting to explore, simply because their stereotypical citizens are so contrasting. Personally both Japanese and Brazilian cultures draw me in, but in very different ways,  so this is a topic I am bound to come back to repeatedly.

The company I run, Profero Tokyo, is part of an international network that boasts a strong presence in Brasil, and in connection with that I was asked to pull together a factual summary of the special relationship Japan and Brasil enjoy, an abridged version of which you can see below.

(Many thanks to Chris Beaumont for his contributions to this document)

Historical bonds between peoples

• In 1907 a treaty was signed between the Brazilian and Japanese governments to grant the Japanese the right to live and work in Brasil.
• After 19th century emigrations, today Brasil is home to the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan ~ 1.5m
• Japan is home to 320k Brazilians,  the largest non-Asian group in the country
• Brasilians perceive a significant role for Japan in Brazil’s development, according to a nationwide survey in 2013 (link – Japanese only):
  • “Which country should be the most important partner of Brasil in the future: Japan (50%) came second after the United States (59%), and was followed by China (32%)
  • Regarding the fields in which Brazilians have expectations of Japan (multiple answers), transfer of technology (42%) came first, followed by such areas as the expansion of the import of Brazilian products (39%), increase of employment by factory establishments (38%), investment (21%) and the export of Japanese products (21%)

Diplomatic & bilateral agreements

During a meeting between respective foreign ministers in September 2013, the following points were agreed (source link):

• Both welcomed the advances being made in the two countries’ relations not only in political and economic relations, but also in a broad range of areas such as education, science and technology, cooperation in the international arena and culture and sports.
• Both ministers shared the view that 2015, which will be the 120th anniversary of the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between Japan and Brazil, will be celebrated not only by holding a large number of events in both countries, but also by strengthening and deepening bilateral relations further.
• During a meeting between President Rousseff and Prime Minister Abe, Brasil’s President praised the recent investments by Japanese companies in Brasil, welcomed more in the future
• Both premiers looked forward to strengthened cultural ties through future sporting events, as consecutive Olympic host nations, and Japan’s soccer team at Rio2014 (source link)
• A bilateral agreement on sharing Nuclear technology has been restarted having been on hold since the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami (source link)
• In 2013 a waiver of visa requirements has been agreed between the two countries for diplomatic & official passport holders.

Cultural touch points: Soccer

• Soccer has become Japan’s biggest national sport, and there are high hopes for the men’s national team in 2014 after reaching the quarter finals in 2010.
• Soccer is even a topic at summit meetings, as President Rousseff told Priminister Abe that she hoped Brasil would meet Japan in the final of the World Cup!?
• Japan’s women’s soccer team are reigning World champions, helping to expand the appeal and involvement to Japanese women and men alike.
• Japanese consumers are already excited by Brasil’s vibrant culture and the World Cup followed by the Olympics will provide the perfect platform for Brasilian brands to launch broad awareness and acceptance in Japan

Cultural exchange: The arts, entertainment & fashion

• Japan is a voracious consumer of foreign fashion brands, entertainment media and food exports. The culture is extremely dynamic, and brands can rise to prominence here much faster than in other markets.
• An example is the Brasillian flip flop brand “havaianas” that bore the Brazilian flag icon on all its products, which became a sell out success in Japan in recent years
• Perhaps seeded through the Japanese communities in Brasil, the Japanese originated manga (adult comics) and anime (animated TV / film) cultures have become mainstream in Brasil over the last 2 decades. Today Japanese anime song vocalists play to sell out 100k audiences in Brasil, and anime command large TV ratings among young audiences. This has inspired a generation of young Brazilian manga artists and animators, the fruits of which have become major cultural exports for Brasil.
• Brazilian culture is equally popular in Japan. The Asakusa Samba Carnival is one of Tokyo’s biggest summer festivals.
• Japan’s leading social mobile service LINE, today boasts 230m users globally, having broken all records in reaching this number in just 2 years since opening. It’s highly visual and vibrant interface is a natural fit with Brasillian users, and LINE places high priority on Brasil as an international market, and Brasillian portuguese will be one of the first languages to enjoy a localized experience
• Japan’s top EC platform, Rakuten, plans to expand its Brazil operation, opened in 2012, to 1,500 merchants in the 12months from October 2013, and is aiming to grow that number to 20,000 by 2018

Inbound investment from Japan Manufacturing & Technology

• Brasil is seen as a desirable place to invest by Japanese companies. Plans to boost production or acquire a local business in order to build a strong foundation for future growth are regularly announced in Japan.
• Brasil is set to overtake Japan as the world’s third biggest car market, and is the focus of a great deal of investment from Japan’s top 3 makers Toyota, Honda and Nissan:
• In 2011 Japan’s biggest beverage company, Kirin Holdings, took 100% control of Brazil’s second biggest brewer, buying the outstanding 49% of stock for $1.35bn. Now called “Brasil Kirin” the company has 15% market share, and in Nov 2013 Kirin announced a $150m investment plan in 2014 to dramatically increase capacity
• Honda decided in August 2013 to spend ~$450m to build a new assembly plant in Itirapina, Sao Paulo State, doubling its production capacity to 240,000 units / year
• Toyota Motor Corp. in August last year started producing the Etios compact model – tailored to Brasil’s growing car market – at its new factory in Sorocaba, Sao Paulo.
• A Nissan Motor Co. manufacturing facility is under construction in Resende in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Operations are slated to begin in the first half of next year creating 2,000 jobs and 200k units/year in production capacity. See this article for more background on Nissan’s Brazil strategy.
• Japanese business activity is not limited to the auto industry: the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Brazil has 354 member companies, the largest number in the group’s history, and they come from a diverse range of sectors.
• An increasing number of presidents running the Brasilian subsidiaries of Japanese companies now double as executive officers of their head offices in Japan, reflecting the strategic importance of Brasil in their international strategies.
• Japan’s leading credit card company, JCB, started issuing credit cards through Caixa in April. JCB already has a network of 1.2m stores in Brasil that accepts its cards.
• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and four other Japanese firms plan to join forces to invest in a Brazilian shipbuilder to better compete with South Korean and Chinese rivals in the lucrative market for resource-exploration vessels, buying a 30% stake in Ecovix-Engevix Construcoes Oceanicas S/A for about 30 billion yen by the end of this fiscal year.
• Technology is also an area of common interest and partnership:
  • Telcos will partner to test a global first 8k broadcast system at the Olympics in 2016
  • Japan is set to share its megafloat technology to support Brasil’s nascent offshore natural gas extraction opportunities

Trading & Agribusiness

• Japan’s large trading companies are further expanding into Brazil’s agricultural sector. Some companies are trying to boost their transactions with local producers and suppliers through acquisitions of Brazilian operations. Others are engaging in agriculture or handling logistics distribution.
• “We want to contribute to boosting Brazil’s presence as the world’s leading grain supplier,” said Seiji Shiraki, Mitsubishi Corp.’s executive vice president and regional CEO
• Trading company Mitsui & Co. have taken a 49.9% stake in a joint venture with SLC Agricola, targeting international exports and expansion of production to Africa
• Japan’s government has approved the large scale import of Brasilian pork, as of 2013.

Japan’s economic trajectory

• “Abenomics” – the name given to Prime Minister Abe’s didactic economic policies to stimulate economic growth, have so far proved very successful
• Today Japan’s economy is growing faster than any in the developed world, and consumer confidence is higher than at any time over the last decade.
• A cornerstone of Abenomics is to make it easier for international business to operate successfully in Japan, and for their international employees to live comfortably and prosper
• This goal is supported by the establishment of innovation zones in 5 major cities including Tokyo, with deregulation allowing fast establishment & profitable operation

The post Brasil x Japan: the ideal hybrid? appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Taking the UK as a yardstick, like Japan an island nation that was never colonised by immigrants in the way that say North America was, at least since prehistorical times, but which started its journey of multi-culturalization a good century or two before Japan did, in its 2001 census 85% of the population described themselves as “white british”. So Japan still has a long way to go, but it is on its way.

All immigrants contribute to the cultural diversity of a country, but not necessarily to the creation of hybrid families. Some do though. According this video, in 2010 there were 30,000 mixed marriages in Japan, and ~2% of children born in Japan were of mixed race. Again this is low compared to some countries, but compared to Japan not so long ago, it is clear that steadily things are changing.

Screenshot from video created by Hafufilm.com

Of course this trend is not unique to Japan. In fact, emigration and ethnic intermarriage is by far the most dominant force on the collective human genome. According to the pre-eminent biologist and evolutionary geneticist, E. O. Wilson, “The impact on humanity as a whole, even while still in this current early stage, is an unprecedented dramatic increase in the genetic variation within local populations around the world. The increase is matched by a reduction in differences between populations”.

So while locally variation is increasing, even in Japan as this video describes, statistically the variance of human genes around the world is going down, which worries some population geneticists. This seems to me like a small price to pay for the rest of us to enjoy “local variety”!

For those like myself who struggle with statistical ideas like variance, imagine the distribution of humanity’s genes say 500 years ago as mountainous islands with big stretches of oceans in between them. With modern emigration and intermarriage those mountains are being eroded down and the gaps between the islands are filling in, bridging between them, with a myriad of new racial hybrid humans.

The areas that are being filled in represent uncharted territory for human genotypes – the space between anglo saxon and Japanese for instance is being filled in with each “half” Japanese half anglo-saxon who is born. Multiply that up by all the combinations of race and you have an explosion in the number of ‘types of human’ on the planet.

But if this trend continues to its logical conclusion, the landscape will end up completely flat with no gaps, valleys or mountains anywhere. There will be many more “types of human” around than before, but the variance will be nil.

This eventuality seems a long way off, but it is perhaps not so far fetched to imagine that two cosmopolitan cities geographically separated, say London and New York, could end up the same genetically when looked at as a population.

Why did these isolated islands of genes exist in the first place? Homo sapiens evolved into anatomically modern humans in Africa, and then set out to colonise the entire planet starting a mere 70,000 years ago or so, reaching as far as Australia by 50,000 years before the present, and finally jumping across the bearing straits to the Americas as recently as perhaps 22,000 years ago.

This is very little time indeed for selective evolution to act. Traits such as skin colour are adaptations to varying UV exposures at different latitudes, but actually, the vast majority of the genetic differences between what we call races is not due to local natural selection, but to random genetic differences in the bands of humans that set out from Africa at different times, and then diverged further through genetic drift, a phenomenon which as the term suggests, has no selective direction.

What all this means is that while race and population genetics is a really fascinating area of science on a global level, those of us who have mixed-race children should not try to read too much into their genetic combination beyond what they look like. Obviously, since this would amount to an affirmation of racial prejudice. And in this sense, the way we look at our “half” children is no different in any way at all to the way any parents look at their child who is genetically half them, and half their partner. Every child, every human is a new type of human, wherever they get labeled on that genetic map of the world.

However, where I think us mixed-marriage types do get to think of ourselves and our progeny as special is in the area of cultural hybridisation. What does it mean to be exposed to two quite distinct cultures from birth compared to a more homogeneous cultural upbringing? I am not exactly sure, but more than genes, this is the interesting question.

The post The explosion of hybrid humans, and what it means for us appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.