Updated: September 10, 2026

Reclaiming the Industrial Lab in the Age of AI

Redefining the Industrial Research Lab

AI is generating extraordinary levels of investment and expectation — and yet the productivity gains that should follow have been slower to materialize. We have selected for hype and investment and away from grounded, solid technological advances. So what's missing? A return to the core industrial-lab mentality: matching the state of the art in technology to genuine customer needs. When you bring those two things together, you get a kind of magic.

That magic, however, does not happen every quarter — which is precisely why so many companies walked away from their labs in the first place. Walking back in is now the right move.

NEC kept that mentality alive throughout a period when many competitors let it atrophy. That continuity is now a strategic advantage.

Looking further ahead, I see an even more fundamental reason why industrial labs will grow in importance. As AI systems become more capable and companies automate more of their operations, what remains genuinely scarce is not the AI itself — it is the deep human expertise needed to understand problems, define solutions, and deploy technology in the real world. If you push the AI trend to its logical extreme, the businesses that succeed will be those that have cultivated both the autonomous capabilities AI enables and the distinctly human expertise it cannot touch. The firms that feed and grow that deep talent are the ones that will succeed.

The industrial lab is not a relic. It is the institution best suited to cultivate exactly what the AI era demands most.

Our R&D, Starting from Real Problems

If one principle defines NEC Labs' research culture, it is this: begin with the customer's challenge, not the technology. There's a temptation, especially among researchers, to think it's all about the technology. But even the most brilliant technical advance is unsellable if no customer needs it. The critical skill is learning to distinguish between a problem that is technically hard and a problem that is commercially valuable — and recognizing that they are not always the same thing.

My test is deliberately simple: start with a problem you could explain to a ten-year-old. The right starting points are human-level questions — how do we move people more efficiently, how do we use less energy to run the world, how do we respond to disasters faster? These are the problems that matter.

To focus further, I look for challenges driven by forces operating at global scale: population growth, environmental pressure, the accelerating frequency of climate-related events. Where a powerful underlying driver pushes a problem forward, the work will never run out of relevance. The research question isn't whether we can stop the curve — it's whether we can reduce its coefficients.

Diversity as a Source of Innovation

The method that makes this research culture work is diversity — not as a value statement, but as an engineering principle. NEC operates global labs across Asia including Japan, the US, and Europe, each bringing perspectives shaped by different contexts and problems. Within each lab, our teams span chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. The sun never sets on NEC's labs — a logistical challenge, but also a profound advantage in breadth of knowledge and perspective.

The rationale runs deeper than headcount. I often say: you never want to send an electrical engineer to solve an electrical engineering problem. The point is not to exclude specialists, but to insist that diverse minds — a mathematician, a biologist, a chemist — will often find solutions the domain expert would have dismissed as wrong or simply different. And occasionally, that difference is a large, disruptive change.

Discipline and Disruption

Disruption is not chaos. It requires discipline — specifically, the discipline to question assumptions that the rest of the field accepts without examination. A good industrial lab watches what the world is doing and then focuses precisely on the places where those assumptions might not hold. The key is being able to look at a problem from many directions at once.

The harder challenge is sustaining this posture inside a research organization. Left to itself, any group of researchers tends toward the mean: everyone gravitates to what everyone else is working on, and distinctiveness erodes. I describe this as a kind of entropy — put many things together and they tend toward the average. Countering that pull is, frankly, a central part of my own role. Someone has to keep delivering a kick, to pull the team toward the orthogonal, the different. That's the research leader's job: making sure the team doesn't start thinking like everyone else.

I'm also candid about the human dimension of this. Pushing people toward unconventional ideas only works within a foundation of trust — and trust takes time to build. Disruption and discipline must coexist: the courage to question every premise, and the rigor to stay rooted in real problems and real customer needs. You never want to discourage someone. The goal is not to unsettle for its own sake, but to make sure the questions being asked are the ones no one else is asking.

What NEC Expects from Its Researchers

The researcher NEC looks for combines two qualities that rarely coexist naturally. The first is depth: genuine mastery of a domain, the kind earned by choosing a narrow area and pursuing it all the way to the frontier — until you understand that narrow range better than almost anyone alive. This is the foundation. Without it, problem-solving stays shallow.

The second quality is the ability to move across boundaries: to take a problem from an unfamiliar field, map it into the domain you know well, reason about it there, and translate the answer back. People who can do that can rapidly grasp problems in entirely new fields and find solutions others never saw. This capacity for cross-domain transformation is what separates a talented specialist from a world-class researcher.

In addition, inseparable from both is a third quality: the ability to communicate. Explaining research to people who do not share your background is not a soft skill — it is the mechanism by which ideas get tested, refined, and ultimately applied. Building that skill is what creates world-class researchers: people who can solve almost any problem, and solve it quickly in their own deep domain in a way that's unique to their perspective.

Together, these qualities define what NEC Labs is building: a research organization that is deeply expert but not narrowly confined, disciplined in its focus on real problems, and restless in its search for the perspectives others have missed.

In an age when AI can increasingly replicate the average, that combination is the only defensible position.

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