Industrial competition with rising economies, new regional investment from the West, and trade pacts among competitors threaten Japan's long postwar prominence. Global market dynamics and regional competition prompted the shift from offshore factories to local networks in the last decade. Similar forces are driving the recent formation of regional Nikkei - Japan-affiliated - nodes in major industrial clusters in Asia.

The central concept of this volume, "knowledge networks," refers to interactive linkages around nodes of tacit and codified knowledge embedded in Global Value Chains....