Reviews the evolution of strategic alliances involving U.S. and Japanese companies in the semiconductor industry, and analyzes whether alliances can contribute to the renewal of an industry faced with stiff competition from Japan. Provides an overview of the changing nature of technology linkages in this important industry.

This book reviews the evolution of strategic alliances involving U.S. and Japanese companies in the semiconductor industry and analyzes whether alliances can contribute to the renewal of an industry faced with stiff competition from Japan. It includes case studies, alternative future scenarios, and suggestions for government and industry.

During the 1970s, Japan supplanted the United States as the world leader in steel production, automobile manufacturing, and consumer electronics. Are the Japanese poised to repeat these successes in the semiconductor industry? This question has vast potential significance, because semiconductor technology holds the key to competitiveness in high technology, one of America's last bastions of industrial supremacy. This book, the product of years of joint research by a multidisciplinary team of American and Japanese scholars, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each country's semiconductor industry with reference to three major areas: technological innovation; the role of government, not only in specific policies directed toward the semiconductor industry, but also in the broader context of industrial policy, government-business relations, and the two political systems; and the influence of financial institutions, ties between banks and businesses, and corporate financing. The book provides, in short, a broad yet in-depth analysis of emerging industrial competition in high technology between the world's two largest market economies.

Japanese semiconductor firms are well known for obtaining dynamics in a short period of time and achieving even global leadership. A significant portion of their success are attributable to cooperative interfirm relations and the development of intermediate organizational structure based on long-term relationship between firms. The purpose of this book is to explain how interfirm relations contributed to their dynamics during the golden age of the semiconductor industry. Meanwhile this book clarifies the real source of dynamics in interfirm relations and how the firms have interacted. The author concludes that the competitive-cum-cooperative (CCC) interfirm interaction are observed. Quantitative and qualitative findings show that firms enjoy not only flexible cooperation based synergy effects, but also dynamics market-like effects by creating competition among partners through CCC interaction.