Following the meteoric rise of Japanese corporations in the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese industrial miracle graced the covers of magazines across the globe. In rage, workers in Detroit were making headlines as well as they lit Japanese cars aflame because of the Japanese car industry's rapid penetration into the U.S. auto market. Questions were rising whether Western companies, in particular American ones, were being hollowed out by increasingly strong Asian tigers. Nowhere was the impact of Japan's corporate success felt more than in business-school classes in the West. By the 1980s, the teaching of Japanese management techniques had claimed a core part of the curriculum of strategy and management courses. A professor who did not teach Japanese management techniques and use case studies of Japanese corporations' success would face criticism.

Yet 15 years after, the exact opposite is true. To teach Japanese management techniques and strategy is to invite ridicule and puzzlement. So what went wrong? How did the Asian miracle occur and what caused it to fall? What will it take for Asian corporations, in particular Japanese ones, to recapture their dynamism?

One could argue that despite the obvious challenges that all companies across the globe today face following the bursting of the Internet bubble, the rise of terrorism, the soft global economy and the recent Sars scare, fertile ground nonetheless exists for reinvigorating corporate Asia. Discussions at this year's World Economic Forum East Asian Summit in Singapore last month brought many of these factors to light. To name just a few trends: China's large and growing market both is a low-cost manufacturing site and a huge market for goods and services; the rich but unexploited media content of Asian cultures, including fairytales, books, music and films, could be leveraged into Western markets; and the hard working and highly educated Asian population and the pop culture of Japan's youth can shed insight into future market trends.

To understand how to exploit this fertile ground, Asian companies would do well to understand what led to their meteoric rise in the past. How is it that Japanese companies rapidly came to dominate global markets? Think of the greatest successes -- Sony's Walkman, JVC's VCRs, energy-efficient, high-quality smaller compact cars made by Honda, Toyota and Nissan. What is common here? And what has allowed Korea's Samsung recently to emerge as a driving force in the global cell-phone industry, or for Japan's DoCoMo to catapult the Japanese's mobile Internet market ahead of all Western counterparts?

A close look reveals two overriding principles. First, the emphasis was not on competing in existing markets but on creating new market spaces. Sony's Walkman, for example, created the new market of high- fidelity mobile stereos. The Walkman essentially combined the size and weight convenience of transistor radios with the acoustics and trendy image of "boom boxes" to unleash a whole new market space that allowed people to listen to their favorite music on trains or while walking down the street. Consumers the world over adored the emotional experience created by Sony and rewarded it with one of the greatest and most profitable runs in Sony's history. But if Sony had benchmarked the competition and focused on incrementally building advantages over them, the insight for the Walkman would have never been born. Likewise, if Japanese automakers benchmarked the models coming down the production lines in Detroit, the mass market for compact, energy-efficient cars would not have been launched by the Japanese.

Second, the Sony Walkman was not the product of a race to provide leading-edge technology. Nor was JVC's enormously successful VCRs or DoCoMo's mobile Internet business or Honda, Toyota and Nissan's high- quality compact cars. What united these companies in their drive to create new market space was a ruthless obsession with "value pioneering," not technology pioneering. That is to say, offering buyers products and services that are radically more fun, simple, productive, convenient, easy to use and environmentally friendly, while pricing these products and services at affordable levels. Take DoCoMo. A month's worth of Internet content cost only as much as a copy of a weekly magazine. By creating the "I-mode" button that allows cell-phone users to be continuously on-line and offering strategically priced Internet content that is easy to access, the mass market for DoCoMo's services exploded. DoCoMo was not a technology pioneer, but it was a value pioneer.

The implications here are clear. If Asian companies are to come back strong, just as Korea's Samsung Electronics has recently done, they should not forget what a historical analysis of their success reveals. To capture the vast emerging opportunities of Asia, a focus on competing in existing markets is not the path. Likewise, while companies the world over are entering the knowledge economy, where ideas and creativity have the highest premium, Asian companies should not become confused about the type of creativity essential to unlocking the markets of tomorrow. The creativity with the highest premium is not technology pioneering, but value pioneering. So offer buyers products and services that may or may not reflect advanced technologies, but first and foremost make their lives dramatically more fun, simple and easy. These products and services should be strategically priced to capture mass buyers.

With such a focus, the world can expect to see a strong and vibrant Asian corporate sector again, creating case studies that find their way into MBA classrooms.

Mr. Kim is Rapporteur of the East Asia Economic Summit 2003 and the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at Insead.