I have a rice cooker in my kitchen. I've had one for a long time.
Rice cookers were invented in Japan in 1955 by members of the Minami family in Tokyo. Later marketed by Toshiba. The members of the family made many traditional iron pots of rice every day over a charcoal flame and measured the temperature of the water and the length of time to cook to taste. The temperature is boiling. The time is 20 minutes. Yoshitada Minami was issued global patents on the invention. The marketed product had to have a sleeve of warm air to make it usable in many climates.
From the point of innovation, the rice cooker ranks as one of the most successful inventions of all time. It is novel, invented and ubiquitous.
Why was it invented in 1955 in Japan? I see lessons for the issue of what makes innovation and successful marketing possible.
Rice eating people numbered approximately half the world population in 1955, 1.5 billion people. Japan was unique in this population in several ways.
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Japan was a thriving market economy unlike all the other rice countries run by dictators, emperors or kings.
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Japan had a booming, expansive economy where much of the old infrastructure had been destroyed by the War.
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Japan had a long history of independent technological innovation.
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Women were entering the workforce and the workforce was short of skilled workers. Men and women leaving the home to work, created a driving pressure for home improvement technologies.
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The inventor and his family were part of the new emerging middle class, not the old elite.
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There was a great sense of optimism and an expansive commercial future in Japan.
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Lastly, Minami had a relationship with Toshiba Corporation that had solid manufacturing and national distribution facilities.
I find many of these qualities are central to all innovation. A thriving market economy, great optimism, the absence of a powerful ruling class, technological competence and marketing distribution.
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