KGRI Working Papers 2020

The COVID-19 crisis has increased the need for remote education. Meanwhile, Japan's school network guidelines by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) had regulated all schools to rely on many dedicated lines. In December 2019, MEXT revised the educational network guidelines, opening the way for all schools to start remote education using internet access via public networks and public cloud services. The new guidelines allowed for the separation of security and network design, protecting student data through a combination of cloud services, authentication, and encryption. A research team from the Keio University Cyber Civilization Research Center and the Keio Research Institute at SFC has been working for many years on reviewing Japan's educational ICT policies. The "Nagasaki-Takaoka Model," discussed in this paper, aims to ensure the reliability of data on open networks and to become a reference model for remote education in Japan from kindergarten through high school. In December 2020, Takaoka City completed preparations to start remote education in all its elementary and junior high schools.

This paper describes how business models in the music recording industry have evolved in accordance with technological developments and a changing societal environment. The research initially started with a historical analysis on how new technologies have been reshaping business models to provide a better, or 'liberating,' experience for consumers while unbundling and rebundling various components of the delivery system to secure revenue from the intangible "experience" good. At the theoretical level, this paper aims to establish a generic model for how technology affects business models in the "experience economy." Development of such a framework is important as the business models suited to physical goods are not useful for the rapidly developing experience goods that are delivered digitally. The first phase of the research strongly suggested that not only technologies but also major societal events, most notably those that triggered economic recessions, may have played a role in the development of new forms of business models in the industry that sometimes use technologies that were developed decades before. A second phase of research was conducted to verify how social events played a role in the evolution of business models and technology adoptions that came with it. We found instances of both technology-led evolution AND socially-led innovations. Ultimately, we found that the meaning of 'liberation' in consumer experience has changed throughout history, which acted as the driving force in the development of business models for experience goods like music.

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have caused the global economy to lose the two growth engines that have driven it since around 1990: (1) globalization and (2) urbanization. In particular, the disruption of globalized supply chains has put the world economy at risk of cost-push inflation and stagflation. It is important to note that signs of the end of globalization were already visible before the pandemic, and this trend has now accelerated. We should also be mindful of the significant differences in how these changes are manifesting in highly digitized industries versus sectors with large physical distribution flows. While globalization will likely continue to advance in digital industries, decentralized production is expected to progress in manufacturing industries. Furthermore, the environment is becoming more conducive to the fragmentation of the global economy into blocs, particularly over issues like the control of IoT data management, which requires close observation.