JICA’s Panel Discussion on “Workers, Managers, Productivity: Kaizen in Developing Countries” Held at GDN Annual Conference in Germany

The Global Development Network (GDN), a public international organization that supports high-quality, policy-oriented, social science research in developing and transition countries as well as global networking, organized its 19th annual conference on 23–25 Oct. in Bonn, Germany. Under the theme “Knowledge for Sustainable Development: The Research-Policy Nexus,” approximately 500 participants from around 100 countries assembled to discuss knowledge and sustainable development.

In addition, Kaizen case studies presented in the parallel session are parts of the findings of the JICA/GDN joint research project on the effectiveness of Kaizen. The research project covers 10 developing countries. Ohno moderated the panel discussion. At the beginning of the session, John Page, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, gave a presentation on the overall research outputs of the project and concluded that Kaizen tools are innovation inputs that enable firms to experiment and adopt new technology. He also explained that workers are critical to Kaizen’s success. Other panel members included Kimiaki Jin, JICA staff and member of the Kaizen research project; Kosi Yankey, executive director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries, Ghana (a counterpart of JICA project); Rosmi Abdullah, director of Malaysia Productivity Corporation that has rich experiences in productivity improvement; and Cornelia Storz, professor at Goethe University in Germany who researches on industrial development in Africa. A good mix of scholars and practitioners discussed evidence-based studies on Kaizen. Moreover, the floor participants actively interacted through the Q&A session and even after the event.

The messages shared among the participants included: 1) Kaizen is a promising tool to improve firm-level productivity in developing countries across various fields, 2) To facilitate successful promotion of Kaizen, contextualization and adaptation as well as the proactive role of the government are essential, and 3) Considering the poor availability of data in developing countries, indicators to measure the impact of Kaizen need to be improved. The research outputs of this conference will be compiled as an open access book titled “Workers, Managers, Productivity—Kaizen in Developing Countries” and be published by Palgrave Macmillan in the United Kingdom by the end of 2019.