The Japanese photo shop industry and its adaptive process toward digitization

Koichiro Kodama and 公一郎 兒玉

No 208, Working Paper Series from Management Innovation Research Center, School of Business Administration, Hitotsubashi University Business School

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to determine how photo shop industry in Japan continue to exist despite the digitization of photography. In this paper, we focus the problem why digital mini-labs were diffused faster than DSCs, despite following three obstructive factors: the enormity of investment; uncertainty regarding the digitization of photography; conservativeness of the photo shop industry. We find following mechanism from case analysis: in contrast to other photo shops, Kitamura especially recognized the digitization of photography as an urgent and crucial problem, and decided to introduce digital mini-labs into all of its photo shops; Kitamura’s entrepreneurial action triggered its rivals to follow suit; digital mini-labs became the standard solution for the problem of digitization for the entire photo shop industry; the emergence of standard solution changed the perspectives of other photo shops that were unaware of the threat.

Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pay
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:hmicwp:208

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