{"id":31157,"date":"2015-10-06T15:17:19","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T13:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=31157"},"modified":"2019-05-02T11:21:25","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T09:21:25","slug":"rudevc-france-japan-year-of-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2015\/10\/rudevc-france-japan-year-of-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Robots, France and Japan Launch Year of Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/rude.vc\/Sfwl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3146\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"http:\/\/markbivens.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/frenchtechtokyo-logo.jpg\" alt=\"frenchtechtokyo-logo\" width=\"158\" height=\"48\" \/><\/a>It was an honor to participate in France&#8217;s governmental delegation to Japan to launch the Year of Innovation between the two countries. Seriously, I&#8217;m not being sarcastic. It&#8217;s true that I like to mock government initiatives in innovation, and my first reaction to the ministerial invitation to serve in the official kick-off of <a href=\"http:\/\/rude.vc\/Sfwl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">FrenchTechTokyo<\/a> was one of instinctive skepticism.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yet Prime Minister Manuel Valls conveyed sincerity and vision in fostering cross-cultural collaboration between two of the world&#8217;s most important tech ecosystems, France and Japan. Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron reinforced the message, underscoring the significance that entrepreneurship holds for both countries&#8217; futures. France needs to break free of the habit of penalizing both those who encounter failure and those who encounter &#8220;too much success,&#8221; he acknowledged.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/markbivens.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/valls_pepper_japan.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-3145\" style=\"margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\" src=\"http:\/\/markbivens.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/valls_pepper_japan.jpg\" alt=\"valls_pepper_japan\" width=\"640\" height=\"440\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">French startups should consider prioritizing the Japanese market in their growth strategies, at least that&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/rude.vc\/Zp2K\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">what I&#8217;ve liked to preach<\/a>. Reciprocally too, I would extoll the virtues of Europe, and in particular France, <a href=\"http:\/\/rude.vc\/6zns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">for Asian startups looking westward<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Japan&#8217;s startup ecosystem reminds me a bit of how France&#8217;s looked not too long ago. The two countries have a lot in common: a broad technical foundation with strong research institutions, a refined palate for design, a pool of talented engineers, a culture of elite educational establishments, and a domestic market that is in many ways both large and not large enough.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Encouragingly, some of the same positive trends we witnessed in France only a few years ago are surfacing in Japan too:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">a growing pioneering spirit of new graduates to decline corporate careers in favor of starting companies<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">a new generation of company builders that are thinking internationally<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">the emergence of serial entrepreneurs<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">a softening of the former stigma associated with failure<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">a growing recognition that lifetime employment is over<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">an increasing acknowledgement that innovation can happen outside the corporation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">My initial skepticism was rooted in the experience that government initiatives, no matter how good the intentions, tend to fizzle out because they are top-down in nature. The most important thing about the current bilateral momentum is that it is more bottom-up, grass roots driven by the startups (and a few VCs) themselves. Time will tell if this early momentum is sustainable, but the initial signals are promising.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em>[Note: a few organizations and individuals deserve special thanks: BusinessFrance for their connections, Orange Japan for their logistical support, DMM.make Akiba for their characteristically gracious hospitality, and Rude Baguette&#8217;s very own Trista Bridges for heroically stepping in as moderator for day two !]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was an honor to participate in France&#8217;s governmental delegation to Japan to launch the Year of Innovation between the two countries. Seriously, I&#8217;m not being sarcastic. It&#8217;s true that I like to mock government initiatives in innovation, and my first reaction to the ministerial invitation to serve in the official kick-off of FrenchTechTokyo was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":31159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10564],"tags":[7921,7933,7236],"class_list":["post-31157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech-2","tag-emmanuel-macron-en-2","tag-japan-en-2","tag-rudevc-en-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}