Going Soft: How the Rise of Software-Based Innovation Led to the Decline of Japan's IT Industry and the Resurgence of Silicon Valley
记录了信息技术创新向软件依赖的系统性转变，利用1983至2004年美国与日本上市IT公司面板数据，发现这一转变导致美国企业表现优于日本，尤其在软件密集型行业，并暗示人力资源约束阻碍了日本企业的适应。
This paper documents a systematic shift in the nature of innovation in information technology (IT) toward increasing dependence on software. Using a broad panel of U.S. and Japanese publicly listed IT firms in the period 1983 to 2004, we show that this change in the nature of IT innovation had differential effects on the performance of the IT industries in the United States and Japan, resulting in U.S. firms increasingly outperforming their Japanese counterparts, particularly in more software-intensive sectors. We provide suggestive evidence that human resource constraints played a role in preventing Japanese firms from adapting to the documented shift in IT innovation. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.