When EcoNaviSta listed on Tokyo’s all-new Growth Market last year, shares in the artificial intelligence-powered big data sleep analysis healthcare start-up zinged nicely higher. Then it started to wobble. Then it began a slide that would destroy 60 per cent of its market value.
Today, the company lolls in a broad pasture inhabited by one of Japan’s most intriguing industrial species: a large, whimpering herd of “punycorns”.
The evolution and proliferation of this creature — the stunted, staid stablemate of the unicorn — says a great deal about how Japan approaches risk, ambition and innovation 35 years after its bubble-era heyday. As the post-deflation need for growth becomes ever more unforgiving, the punycorns’ existence, and the environment in which they are able to survive, is likely to become even more problematic than now.