Trinity for Innovation: the Case of Tokyo Rope in the Meiji Era

How companies can achieve the urgently required innovation is a contemporary issue. As a historical example of this issue, this paper notices the case of Tokyo Rope Corporation (Tokyo Seiko) in the Meiji era (1868-1911). The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors of Tokyo Rope’s R&D based on the records of the company history and other documents. This paper points out three factors: (1) rebuilding a corporate governance structure for ambidexterity, which refers balancing the exploitation of existing products with the exploration of new developments; (2) intellectual communication between academic researchers and practitioners; and (3) smooth B2B transactions. The trinity of these factors could have brought about rapid innovation.