Small centre generating big ideas

Date: 04/07/1996

By Tim Jones

EUROPEAN companies have learnt a lot from their Japanese counterparts but not as much as they think, according to the man charged with continuing their business education.

“What can be discovered in Japan comes from going there, staying two weeks, talking to people, asking them how they put together a line of machine tools or how everyone in the company participates in decisions,” says Jean-Michel Corre, co-director of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation in Brussels.

“These are all things that are now common knowledge but, even if they are, they are not yet common practice in Europe. This is why these programmes are so important both for big business and smaller companies.”

The cooperation centre has been operating in Tokyo since 1987, but its board recently decided that a Brussels branch was essential.

Corre, Japanese co-director Takamasa Sato, and the centre's two other staff members have moved into new premises but are still finding their feet. However, the French director, educated in Paris and the US and building on a 23-year career at the European Commission, is unbounded in his enthusiasm for his task.

“My passion is ensuring the competitiveness and survival of European industries, but not in the old-fashioned interventionist way, even if I am French,” he says. “We are small, but sometimes big ideas come from small units.”

Encouraging both European and Japanese companies to cooperate at the so-called 'pre-competitive stage' of production is essential, he believes.

Corre's experience at the Commission in the late Eighties in the negotiation of Japan's voluntary export restraint agreement with the Union on cars reinforced this belief.

“This was a time of tension with Japan, around 1985-87,” he recollects. “We could see Japanese industry taking remarkable market shares based on excellent production quality, marketing and so on.”

“The initial reaction was the same kind of protectionism you would have seen in any part of the world, but then some people started to take a longer view: asking why this was happening and how we could be less antagonistic with the Japanese, because, every day, we both have to survive.”

The Tokyo centre was set up to help bring an end to these confrontations. “This is how it became essentially a management training centre because the first need was to understand, to learn and then emulate. We knew the Japanese were serious because although the centre is co-funded roughly 50-50, the benefits come primarily to European firms,” says Corre.

The centre offers information services, seminars, training courses in Japan for EU managers, topical missions to Japan on specialised subjects and a programme to bring ten top Japanese students to the Union every year to learn about European techniques (the Vulcanus programme).

Everybody knows that European companies can learn from Japan, but much less mention is made of what Europe can teach the Japanese.

“Japanese industry is two-pronged,” says Corre. “Some firms are extremely modern and absorbed all the American management techniques before the Americans themselves realised they needed them in the Seventies and Eighties. Those are the big companies that are exporting all over the world. But there are other aspects of the Japanese economy - building contractors or many retail services - where the Japanese are far less competitive and efficient than we think.”

Corre believes both sides can learn about the growth area of the future - high technology products and services.

“High-tech has spread all over the world. It is not true that Japan, the EU or the US is the best. Sometimes the best people and companies are very small and can be anywhere in the world. You can get ideas from anyone.”

The growing demands on the centre in Tokyo and its operations in Brussels, which had been run by the Directorate-General for industry (DGIII), became too much for them to handle. It was then that the board decided to create the new office because “the projects require agile, non-administrative ways of doing things and quick responses”.

The Vulcanus project alone demands a lot of management time and effort.

Nevertheless, having an agency at arm's length from the Commission should not worry those - including some in the Parliament - who are concerned about the proliferation of these less accountable offices.

“I accept that there could be criticism, but the answer is that this is a very lean operation which is needed to do things in a business-like way. You cannot deal with industries and do practical things for their benefit in real time by following administrative procedures,” insists Corre.