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Recent findings indicate that the Japanese IT sector increasingly lags the U.S. IT sector in software innovation and that this underlies Japan's weakening competitive performance vis-à-vis U.S. IT. This article explores alternative explanations for this outcome and analyzes what explains the Japanese software industry's trajectory. The sources are found in the late understanding of the transformational role of software and its value-creating potential as well as in the evolution of the industry's structure. Finally, this article considers what policy makers in other nations might learn from the Japanese experience in building a more vibrant software industry.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Consumers were surprised in October 2009 by the first of a series of highly publicized recalls of Toyota vehicles in the United States. Citing a potential problem in which poorly placed or incorrect floor mats under the driver's seat could lead to uncontrolled acceleration in a range of models, Toyota announced that it was recalling 3.8 million U.S. vehicles. For manufacturing executives who have strived for decades to emulate Toyota, the mere suggestion that it had quality issues was a serious matter. All over the world, executives paused to wonder if they had been chasing after the wrong manufacturing model. Despite Toyota's long record of building reliable, low-defect vehicles, public perceptions about quality are often greatly influenced by reports in the media and their overall timing, the author argues. The key question was the source of Toyota's problems: To what extent did they originate with the product designs and assembly, and to what extent could they be pegged to the company's supply and manufacturing systems? The author discusses two root causes for Toyota's quality problems. The first is an outgrowth of management's ambitions for rapid growth. Management's goal was to increase Toyota's global market share from 7.3% in 1995 to 10% over the next decade, then to 15% by 2010. The second is the result of the increasing complexity of the company's products. A typical auto sold in the United States or Europe has more than 60 electronic control units and more than 10 million lines of computer code -a fourfold increase over what was common a decade ago. However, the author notes that any thorough analysis would also need to acknowledge the role of the company's centralized management structure. The result: Top management in Japan was less sensitive to the expectations of regulators, culture, and politics in overseas markets, and consequently they were slower to respond to local problems.

This article explores the rise to quality leadership by Japanese automakers, the decline in U.S. automakers' quality reputation, and whether poor quality still contributes to the U.S. automaker's competitive woes. Perception plays a key role in quality competition but not necessarily in ways that we commonly think. The ways in which information about quality performance is displayed plays an important role in customer perception. Quality should not be seen as a stand-alone asset but rather it must be understood in the context of other assets, including a firm's brand equity. It is quality's relationship to brand equity that helps explain the current quandary of U.S. automakers, and this relationship holds lessons for other industries.

The belief that there is a positive link between quality and innovation is widely shared among quality professionals. Yet the experience of Japanese manufacturing firms, who are well known for their high standards of quality performance, casts doubt upon this relationship. In fact, the inability of some Japanese high-technology firms to introduce radical and disruptive new technologies is in part due to the emphasis they have placed on product quality. By delaying the introduction of new technologies until their quality could be assured, they lost out to American firms who were willing to introduce new products and service features that met the needs of consumers, even though they were not free from deficiencies, such as Apple's iPod. Uses three major case studies from the Japanese high-tech sector to analyze what kinds of innovation might be undermined by a focus on quality and explores its managerial implications.