Naoya Takei
Japan
CAREER Enrolled in April 2011; Completed doctoral degree in March 2017
I entered KMD with questions on how mature companies should approach triggering next-level innovations. Having been involved in product development at a manufacturer, I became more aware of this problem and grew interested in the method of design thinking at KMD. After entering KMD, I was involved from the inception of a project for promoting next-level innovation at NKC (Nakanishi Metal Works Co., Ltd.), a corporation with stable technical capacities. While this took four years, in 2018 we finally reached the point of commercializing a service called “agbee” that benefits farmers in the outskirts of urban areas through the use of partner robots. When commercializing a product, one encounters very different problems when thinking about what first needs to be done, in other words the issue of creating 1 from 0, to the subsequent issues involved in making 1 into 10 or 10 into 100. I specifically attribute my ability to engage with these real-world problems to KMD and the support I got from professors.
Drawing on this experience, I am currently supporting the development of innovative solutions at various companies. I spend each day productively engaged with finding practical solutions to the questions that first prompted me to attend KMD.
(This article was written in March 2018.)