South Korea

In The Business Reinvention of Japan, Ulrike Schaede explores Japan's approach to economic development in the late 20th and early 21st century. Her thesis is that this approach-what she calls an "aggregate niche strategy"-offers important lessons for the West by balancing the pursuit of corporate profit with social stability, economic equality, and social responsibility and sustainability. It's also a case study in the power of open organization principles, which come to life in Schaede's account. I would argue that Japan's "aggregate niche strategy" was successful, in part, because of them. In this review, I'll explore Schaede's argument about Japan's economic development in order to demonstrate how open principles played a role in Japan's "reinvention." In this first part, I'll provide some historical, economic context necessary for understanding Schaede's argument. In the next part, I'll explore in more detail the implications of Japan's strategy and the role open principles clearly played in it.

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Open source software is growing exponentially all around the world, and South Korea is a vital part of that trend. While most South Korean open source projects don't get the international attention that projects from the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and similar organizations receive, they are making significant contributions to mobility, artificial intelligence, web technologies, and other areas. Samsung may be the best-known South Korean company working in open source, but Naver, Kakao, Coupang, and others are also writing important open source software and maintaining their projects on GitHub.