IGOpeople

I am not a member of the group so I cant speak for the group but I think Keiretsu is where a collaborative group of businesses come together to preferentially trade with each other. They usually have strong cross holding in equity & trade. Many foreign businesses have complained about this close interrelationship between the Japanese firms as they looked on it as unfair competition and a barrier to entry into the Japanese market...anyways thats my 2 cent, hope it helps...

Thanks Cormac, sounds interesting. Will keep an eye on this group :)

Hi Gita, Cormac,

I'm also a big fan of Japanese culture and business practices including kaizen (continuous improvement) etc. I started this group to investigate how people might like to start new ways of partnering and collaborating in business. Another useful, model is the idea of co-opetition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition .

I read a book years ago called "The Digital Economy" by Don Tapscott where he envisaged that the software industry would become like the movie industry where groups of developers from different disciplines would work together on a project by project (think movie) basis. How precisely the equity of such productions might be arranged could be modeled on the production of a film.

So while many may view the Japanese keiretsu model as promoting collusion and "anti-competitive", there are non-Japanese models for collaborating that have no such negative connotation. I am very much of the opinion that if the Irish economy consisted more of lots of small businesses that collaborated with each other where possible rather than being at the mercy of bigger companies who might and usually do re-locate at some point, that we would not be in such a vulnerable position now.

That's my 2 cents for the moment - more later...

B :)