Toyoda father and son with Buddhist Nichiren school mind: endless inventor-entrepreneurs

Compared with development orientation by Tesla, BYD, and Honda, Toyota has been regarded as just focusing on the incremental improvement at manufacturing shop floors as a Japanese management style or Just In Time firm since 1980s. Among major Japanese electrical appliance manufactures as Sharp, Panasonic, and Sony have been losing against Apple and Samsung, why can only Toyota keep the Japanese representative firm position still? As key concept, an inventor-entrepreneur is a joint role as an inventor of innovative technology and a decision maker of risk management to integrate such technology and niche market and to quickly translate a new business idea into a start-up firm. As the mental supports to make possible to continue Sakichi Toyoda's invention without being discouraged by a lot of failures, there can be three: the Nichiren school of Buddhism, Sontoku Ninomiya's moral requital thought, and S. Smile's “Self-Help”. Particularly Japanese Nichiren is a Buddhism denomination's founder who propagated with robust unyielding mind in spite of much persecution and difficulty. The paper seeks to objectively try explaining economical validity of values or spirits of endless efforts until overcoming many initial failures in the invention and founding start-ups by inventor-entrepreneurs through initial negative profits period, based on respective historical trajectory of Toyota group founder, Toyoda Sakichi's loom and his son Ki-ichiro's automobile by using real options analysis. That is, we will examine the validity of firm or regional culture of investment continuity for invention and founding from a valuation perspective.