What are your current work responsibilities?

I promote open innovation in fundamental research. Open innovation is the concept of creating new added value by collaborating with external organizations with which one has not had any previous relationship, and this concept is rapidly spreading in Japan. In terms of promoting fundamental research, I am mainly responsible for building a network with hub institutions that unite external organizations and collecting information from them. The process of producing research results requires collaboration with various external organizations. We have robust discussions with researchers at Suntory Global Innovation Center to understand their research needs, and then search for external organizations and researchers that match those needs through the hub institutions. We then match our researchers with the external organizations and researchers we found in our search so that our researchers can collaborate with them promptly.

Can you tell us about your career to date?

Prior to joining Suntory, I worked as an engineer for an automotive parts manufacturer, designing and producing in-vehicle systems. In the process, I learned that innovation alone does not lead to profit, and that technology advances so quickly that acquired skills and knowledge quickly become obsolete. I also attained a patent attorney qualification in order to apply it to our intellectual property strategy.

Since joining Suntory, I have been in charge of the intellectual property strategy, which is an activity that links innovation to profit. Specifically, I am in charge of beverage production equipment, packaging materials, and beer, and have promoted our intellectual property strategy, which includes invention and design research, alliances with external organizations, and rights acquisition. An intellectual property strategy is essential for collaboration with external organizations, and I feel that my past career and my patent attorney qualification have been put to good use in my current job.

Is there anything in your work that has left an impression on you?

As we continue our search for new external organizations, we have had increasingly more opportunities to meet researchers affiliated with venture companies. They were extremely motivated, having chosen the path of entrepreneurship to implement their own research ideas in society. I feel that it is very important for the Suntory Group to engage in friendly competition with these external organizations and to actively co-create with them. I would like to bring the vitality of open innovation to the field of fundamental research so that the Suntory Group can continue to generate new knowledge into the future.

What is the dream you want to achieve at Suntory?

The network we are trying to build with hub institutions and external organizations is a kind of infrastructure for promoting fundamental research. Therefore, if it is not utilized at all by researchers inside and outside the company, it will be nothing more than a box and will not generate any value. I would like to see this infrastructure being actively utilized by both internal and external researchers to the extent that traffic jams occur and it generates increasingly more new research results. I will enthusiastically promote collaboration with researchers at Suntory Global Innovation Center so that this infrastructure is used more and more. Open innovation is being addressed by various companies with their own approaches.

In this context, I hope that our open innovation activities themselves surprise and inspire, causing people to think ‘well done Suntory,’ and that the results of our fundamental research through these activities will lead to the continuous creation of products that bring happiness, surprise, and inspiration to our customers. This is what I want to achieve, this is my dream.

A typical day’s schedule