Within this article it described how at the May 2021 summit in Tokyo, not only did the United States and Japan reaffirm their security alliance, but they also created a pact to focus on collaboration on several areas of technology and innovation. The pact was called the Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership which is a multi-domain innovation pact. This pact established a network of technological collaboration between Japan and the United states. This team up allows for Japan and the United States to be each other’s resources of technological innovation and open a wider source of consumers. However the article also describes the several challenges that the countries must overcome that occur with creating new networks. This included policy coordination, cooperation and the importance of connecting the two countries’ startup ecosystems across the Pacific. Although such collaboration has various challenges, the article also explored the various advantages each country could gain, this included broader economic ties.
This article relates to the topic of Social Networks within our class. Each country has its set of startup ecosystems that all have strong ties to each other. The startup ecosystems include large firms, labor markets, law firms, accounting firms, accelerators, and incubators. I have included a drawing of the network graph below. Weak ties are those corresponding to acquaintances, whereas strong ties are those corresponding to friends. A claim we learned in class is that if a node A in a network satisfies the Strong Triadic Closure Property and is involved in at least two strong ties, then any local bridge it is involved in must be a weak tie. Within each startup there are various groups that satisfy the Strong Triadic Closure Property. For example node U.S has strong ties to startup ecosystems of law firms and accelerators, and law firms and accelerators also have a connecting edge. A local bridge is if its endpoints A and B have no friends in common, that is to say it does not form a side of any triangle in the graph. Now there is a local bridge between Japan and the U.S since, the U.S has a higher incentive to use American startups than Japanese startups, as demonstrated in the illustration. Thus this local bridge between the U.S and Japan is a weak tie, which makes sense since weak ties serve to link together different tightly-knit communities that each contain a large number of stronger ties. However, with this new collaboration pact we can expect that neighborhood overlap should grow as tie strength grows. The collaboration pact will expand the network of the U.S and increase the embeddedness and connections within a network graph of the U.S to other countries, allowing us to gain greater resources for future innovations.
