Sony’s research director, the famed physicist Makoto Kikuchi, told an American journalist that Japan had fewer geniuses than America, a country with “outstanding elites.” But America also had “a long tail” of people “with less than normal intelligence,” Kikuchi argued, explaining why Japan was better at mass manufacturing. American chipmakers clung to their belief that Kikuchi was right about America’s innovation advantage, even though contradictory data was piling up. The best evidence against the thesis that Japan was an “implementer” rather than an “innovator” was Kikuchi’s boss, Sony CEO
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