Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town: Panasonic’s Challenge in Building a Sustainable Society

Urban utility equipment and electronic goods manufacturers are experiencing profound challenges in this age of rapid technological change. Panasonic, Japan’s leading electronics company, has also recognized the limits of its traditional product manufacturing orientation and decided to enter IT-intensive town management in view of these challenges. It has advanced a new strategy for creating sustainable communities to encourage both stakeholders and local residents to get involved. Stressing sustainability, the strategy has adopted a long-term perspective (i.e., a 100-year timeframe). Significantly, it must provide values that foster community-based sustainability and adopt a business model that ensures the economic viability of both constructing the town and managing its ongoing services. As information systems play a big part in the provision of services in the new town, the strategy requires the linking of information with technology and social aspects, quite unlike traditional manufacturing, which is solely based on technology concerns. As part of its new strategy, Panasonic defined five prominent service areas (i.e., energy, security, mobility, wellness, and community). The company thought these areas would expand and generate new value and services throughout the strategy’s timeframe

From Self-interest To Commons: Distinct Aspect Of social Bookmarking Services

With web contents being generated and shared at an ever-increasing pace, a number of approaches to effectively control and retrieve contents have been developed. Social tagging is a widely implemented method for classifying contents resulting from the dispersed activities of users. Social bookmarking services (SBM) is a web service with the purpose of making information generally available on a shared basis. Accumulation of tags on SBM occurs mainly without inviting the collaboration of others, but on the basis of activities satisfying individual self-interest. SBM is in fact the optimal web platform utilizing the sum of such activities for the formation of commons

"Risk Reduction Systems of the Internet Shop---Based on the consumer survey in Japan---" (in Japanese)

Many Internet shops have appeared, and most of the shops worry about customer acquisition. We applied the focus to consumer's perceived risk as a key to the success of the Internet shop, and considered the strategy of the shop. That is, it is thought that the Internet shop adopts an appropriate risk reduction system, and the customer can be acquired. Especially, the questionnaire survey for the consumer was executed to clarify the relation between the consumer attribute and the risk reduction system. As a result of the investigation, the following two points have become clear. First, risk reduction systems are possible to divide roughly into the offer of evaluation information and the offer of detailed information, and the consumers also were recognizing the difference of these. Secondarily, the persons who had confidence in the Internet shopping had the tendency to value detailed information more than evaluation information, and were doing "Selection of the risk reduction system". They are the lowest the perceived risk, and shop at the Internet shops frequently. It was guessed that other consumers that the confidence degree was low did not relate to the repeat purchase because the perceived risk was high. It is thought that the Internet shop should adopt the risk reduction system that people with a high confidence degree chose, in order reduce the perceived risk effectively and to expand customer.

Design of a Resilient Information System for Disaster Response

The devastating 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake made people aware of the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for sustaining life during and soon after a disaster. The difficulty in recovering information systems, because of the failure of ICT, hindered all recovery processes. The paper explores ways to make information systems resilient in disaster situations. Resilience is defined as quickly regaining essential capabilities to perform critical post disaster missions and to smoothly return to fully stable operations thereafter. From case studies and the literature, we propose that a frugal IS design that allows creative responses will make information systems resilient in disaster situations. A three-stage model based on a chronological sequence was employed in structuring the proposed design principles