Diverse customer base and researcher awareness lead to successful commercialization

After researching optical measurement using lasers as a student, I joined a Japanese manufacturer where I worked on the research and development of microscopes using holography technology. However, despite my continued research efforts aimed at achieving commercialization over a period of nine to ten years, the project ultimately fell short of commercialization. The exploration of promising markets where the developed technology could be applied and the securing of internal resources did not go as planned. Management decided that “although the technology is interesting, it does not work as a business,” and the project was shut down.

This led to a strong personal desire to experience the post-commercialization phase, and I decided to change jobs. The company that I transferred to had just launched a new business at the time, and I was involved in developing analysis technologies for microscopic images. I found the dynamic daily changes in the environment that are unique to a new business to be stimulating. However, the overall business policy unfortunately shifted, which resulted in a reduction in resources allocated to technology development for image analysis. When it became inevitable that my work would shift to other areas outside of image processing, I decided to change jobs once again after considering my future career and joined NEC, a company that I was linked by fate.

After joining NEC, I realized that it has a massive scale and relationships with a diverse range of customers and businesses. Consequently, even if a newly created technology cannot be used in one area, you can readily attempt to propose it to a different area or industry. After previously working at companies that were one-tenth or one-third the size of NEC, I feel very fortunate to be in such an environment.

I was also amazed by the fact that each individual researcher has a vision for commercialization from the initial stages of research. I strongly feel that every researcher is consciously thinking about how they will propose their technology to a specific customer from the initial research stages. In the highly uncertain activity of research, everyone is carefully thinking about how to efficiently achieve tangible output. As a result, I believe that this fosters an awareness of efficient means of social value creation, such as advancing the development of a design that can be proposed to more than one company, which is used to accelerate and successfully commercialize results.