2005年度の活動報告

Musashi University Faculty of Faculty of Economics Department of Management Noriyuki Takahashi

The specific activities for fiscal 2005 are shown in the table below, and are explained as follows:

What became clear from last year's survey results was the importance of entrepreneurship in community businesses. In particular, in community businesses, which tend to be driven by a desire to "try it," the challenge is to build an organization and keep it going. Entrepreneurship can be broadly divided into three activities. The first is discovering and recognizing business opportunities, the second is building the necessary systems and procuring the management resources to execute those business opportunities, and the third is maintaining and continuing the business or organization.

With this in mind, this year (2005) we focused on the second and third stages of entrepreneurship, and the following points have become clear to some extent.

First, community businesses change over time from loosely organized groups of people to organizations with clearly defined roles. As they evolve from soft organizations to hard organizations, leaders emerge and organizational rules are established. This differs from profit-seeking entrepreneurship, which forms hard organizations from the start.

Second, the maintenance of an organization depends heavily on non-financial motivations. While any organization is supported by people with diverse motivations, the fact that non-financial motivations play a large role is a defining feature of community businesses. Therefore (or perhaps especially because of this?), a corporate philosophy that defines what the organization does and why it does it is important.

Third, they need diverse sources of income other than the income they receive in return for the provision of goods and services. A common pattern for American nonprofit organizations is that half of their budgets are funded by national or local governments, with the other half being self-financed. Even if a community business can balance its income and expenditures on an operating basis, if it has to cover capital investments (depreciation) on its own, only a handful of such businesses would be able to do so.

Considering the above, even though community businesses may at first glance appear to be doing the same things as general for-profit organizations, there appear to be significant differences in the management resources and governance that support their businesses.

Next year (2006), we would like to conduct more in-depth and focused research on this point.