Maximizing the Value of Japanese IP: Structural Challenges and the Direction for Management

In recent years, IP such as anime, manga, and games originating in Japan has gained enthusiastic support on a global scale. A key driver of this market expansion has been the broad range of genres and target audiences. While works from other countries tend to be skewed toward children or specific genres, Japanese anime spans diverse genres such as school life, science fiction, fantasy, action, and mystery, reaching a wide range of age groups.

Furthermore, by centering on universal themes such as growth, friendship, effort, and victory, works have been created that remain beloved over time without being influenced by trends. Because of these established worlds, multifaceted development across video, games, merchandising, events, and collaborations becomes possible.

Why, then, has Japan been able to produce such diverse IP? One factor is the breadth of companies involved in the IP business. A wide variety of players, from large enterprises to small and medium-sized companies, including animation studios, publishers, game developers, and toy manufacturers, coexist and leverage each other’s strengths, resulting in the creation of diverse IP.

Supporting the creation of hit works by this multi-layered group of companies is a division-of-labor production scheme known as the production committee system. By pooling investments from multiple companies, the system distributes risk while consolidating expertise, establishing a structure that efficiently promotes production, distribution, theatrical release, merchandising, and marketing. It has served as a driving force for creating a wide range of works and expanding them globally.

On the other hand, due to intensifying global competition, diversification of customer touchpoints, and advances in AI, structural challenges inherent in the production committee system are becoming more apparent.

The challenges that Japan’s IP industry faces in maximizing value are not limited to the fact that rights are divided among multiple entities. At their core is the difficulty of making decisions that consider the IP as a whole within a dispersed structure. The most important structural issues can be summarized as “dispersion of rights and operations,” “fragmentation of initiatives and data,” and “weakness of decision-making mechanisms.”

The production committee system that has supported Japan’s IP industry is a rational mechanism from the perspectives of reducing production cost burdens, utilizing the expertise of each company, and dispersing risk. However, from the perspective of maximizing IP value, not only are legal rights dispersed, but operational decisions such as “what should be prioritized” and “how to deploy” also tend to become dispersed.

The problem is that the more each player makes decisions based on their own profit and business rationality, the more the IP as a whole tends to fall into local optimization. While each initiative, such as merchandising, distribution, events, and overseas expansion, has its own rationale, without a perspective that captures in an integrated way how each contributes to enhancing the overall value of the IP, initiatives tend to remain isolated.

In recent years, as areas of IP utilization have further expanded, the burden of decision-making has increased. As choices such as secondary use, collaboration, cross-border expansion, and digital initiatives increase, decision-making becomes important not only in terms of “what to implement,” but also “what to implement first” and “what not to implement.” However, when the perspective or function responsible for such decisions is absent, decisions tend to gravitate toward initiatives that promise short-term revenue or those that are easier to reach agreement on among stakeholders.

These structural challenges manifest in more concrete forms in actual client engagements. There are three main issues.

Even if merchandising, events, promotions, and collaborations are individually viable, if they proceed without a clear overarching policy such as “in which markets, for which customers, and with what value this IP should be grown,” the synergistic effects between initiatives weaken. While short-term sales may be generated, it becomes difficult to see what is being built up for the IP as a whole.

While information such as purchasing data, e-commerce data, event attendance data, social media responses, fan community feedback, and overseas sales performance exists to a certain extent, it is often stored by department, contractor, or channel and is not viewed across functions. In addition, differences in granularity and update frequency mean that it is often not organized in a way that directly supports decisions such as “which markets to prioritize,” “which categories to grow,” and “which customer segments to emphasize.”

In environments with many stakeholders, initiatives that are “easy to reach agreement on” or “easy to operate within existing structures” tend to be prioritized over those that “can maximize value.” When development policies and investment decisions depend on the experience of specific individuals or stakeholders, the rationale behind decisions such as “why this merchandising,” “why this regional expansion,” and “why this collaboration” is not codified as organizational knowledge and lacks reproducibility. As a result, not only are growth opportunities missed, but initiatives also proceed without clear objectives, leading to secondary issues such as digital transformation and infrastructure development becoming ends in themselves.

These three issues do not exist independently; rather, they are intertwined as a structure in which “policy → data → decision” are not linked, and this becomes the root cause that hinders the maximization of IP value. Therefore, what is required is not improvement of individual initiatives, but the construction of an integrated management foundation that considers the IP as a whole.

As described thus far, for Japanese IP to enter its next growth phase, it is necessary to evolve the industry structure and management approaches while maintaining existing strengths. The following three points are important directions.

The strength of Japanese IP will continue to lie in creative capabilities, but this alone is not sufficient. On the premise of creating excellent works, the ability to determine in which markets, for which customers, and in what sequence value should be expanded, and how it should be sustained, will determine future competitiveness. The competitive advantage in the IP business is shifting its center from the “ability to create” to the “ability to define value and continue making decisions.”

Considering the reality of Japan’s IP industry, it is not realistic to fundamentally change the multilayered structure in which rights and stakeholders exist. Therefore, it is necessary to design decision-making mechanisms that ensure overall optimization within that premise. It is important to compensate for the disadvantages of the dispersed structure by leveraging the execution mechanism while incorporating the IP control tower function and integrating decision-making.

To make decisions based on fan behavior, consumer responses, market characteristics, effectiveness of initiatives, and overseas market trends, it is necessary not only to develop data infrastructure but also to utilize AI for hypothesis formation, simulation, and decision support. Rather than dismissing experience and intuition, strengthening them with data and AI and connecting them to more reproducible decision-making is important for enhancing the competitiveness of Japanese IP.

In implementing these, the key is not to separate planning, decision-making, execution, operation, and verification. While short-term revenue acquisition and mid- to long-term brand and fan value development sometimes conflict, achieving both requires consistent design and follow-through.

ABeam Consulting has strengths in this domain both in technology-driven advanced support and in hands-on support that considers everything from planning to implementation and adoption. Through initiatives such as formulating data and AI utilization strategies, developing decision-making foundations, designing cross-departmental structures, and supporting the implementation of initiatives, ABeam Consulting will support the advancement of management aimed at maximizing IP value.

In particular, in supporting expansion into Asian markets, we are promoting the creation of AI-driven digital twins of consumer personas in each country (a method that reproduces the consumer profiles of each country using AI). This approach supports decision-making by simulating event attendance and merchandise sales when marketing initiatives are virtually executed for the constructed personas. A distinctive feature is the ability to build highly accurate personas by utilizing “raw consumer data” collected by our local subsidiaries, and by continuously reflecting actual sales data, it realizes a mechanism for improving persona accuracy, which in turn improves simulation accuracy.

For Japan to continue to be a global IP powerhouse, it is essential to strengthen the “ability to make decisions” and “ability to drive execution” that connect the “ability to create” cultivated thus far to sustained business value. We aim to continue contributing to the evolution of Japan’s IP industry structure and the realization of sustainable value creation through consistent support from planning to implementation and adoption.