On October 20, the SPRIE-Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) hosted a panel discussion featuring venture capitalists and a group of U.S.-Japan experts. The discussion with the title, "U.S.-Japan VC Cooperation and the Fly Over Phenomenon" was moderated by SPRIE Researcher, Robert Eberhart and held at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Panelists included Michael Alfant, CEO of Fusion Systems, Martin Kenney, Professor at UC Davis, Allen Miner, Founder of SunBridge, Scott Ellman, CEO of USAsia Venture Partners, Quaeed Motiwala, Managing Director at DFJ JAIC, and William F. Miller, Co-director of SPRIE. They discussed the tendency of U.S. based venture capital firms to fly from Silicon Valley, over Japan, and invest into China.

The panel noted that the reasons usually given by U.S. venture capitalists for the flyover phenomemon is that Japan has obscure accounting, uncertain relief in courts, and too far away to monitor. But since those risks are much larger in China other explanations were needed.  The lack of innovation - i.e. copycat firms -  that flourish in new niches in China are more attractive for VCs than the highly competitive and risky new technologies in Japan. Panelist also suggested that investing cycles are dominated by "fashion" with Japan being out of fashion, and noted the late stage investing pattern in China versus earlier stage investing in Japan and the U.S.  Finally, the panel posed an interesting question for STAJE research that perhaps under certain circumstances protected markets that are now in China might reduce the risks and increase returns for venture capitalists.

RRamesh Srinivasan, assistant professor at UCLA in design and media/information studies, delivered the Oct. 20 Liberation Technology seminar. The talk was entitled, “Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt.” This wide ranging talk takes us through his fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, India and other countries and culminates with his recent fieldwork in Egypt on the use of social media in the revolution. Through these journeys he argues that technology has the potential to act as a ‘bridge’ that could connect peoples across cultures.

Ramesh discusses his field experiments in India where he provided people in his fieldwork villages with video cameras to document any issue that was valuable to them, and discovered that the process of recording and watching the videos helped in developing broad social priorities. Similarly during his work in Kyrgyzstan and in Egypt he observed that a small sphere of bloggers used social media to create strong ties among themselves, and given the media ecology with the social media having connections with other media, they ended up having a broader reach among the international community. In essence, they served as bridges communicating across boundaries.

The key themes of the talk revolved around the concepts of bridges, interfaces and networks. Ramesh argued that he has sought to understand the role that technology could play in fostering meaningful dialogue among peoples who have different vocabularies and understandings with which they approach the world i.e. “What bridges will bring people together in terms of multi-cultural interaction?” Ramesh argued that technologies are culturally constructed, and culturally created and that technologies can serve as bridges if diverse cultural values or ontologies are considered in their design. Technologies can then act as bridges to connect people across networks.

The talk takes us through the complexities of social media serving as a bridge and discusses preliminary ideas for designing an online architecture that could provide a space for multiple voices and serve as a bridge across different cultures.