A Vision of Integrated Innovation

Sadayuki SAKAKIBARA Vice Chairman, Nippon Keidanren President, CEO & COO, Toray Industries, Inc.

Facing an unstable global economy, Japan must build a stronger scientific and technological foundation to enhance its industrial competitiveness. This is the only way to sustain growth and make meaningful contributions to global development. It is more urgent than ever that we develop original industrial technologies and share them with the world. We must create more effective tools to address the problems we all face, for instance, global warming and other environmental issues.

But this is no simple task. Technology development is influenced not only by technology itself, but also by a complex patchwork of other factors including economic efficiency, environmental impact, social contribution, education, and ethics. In this era of rapid diversification, we must fully understand the key role of integration. If we want to develop truly original industrial technologies, we can no longer depend on academic research done with a silo mentality in separate scientific fields. Nor can we merely pursue more expertise in a single technology. We live today under a new technology paradigm, one that demands us to take an interdisciplinary approach to creating a better technology architecture that generates technological fusion.

Since ancient times, the development of Japan has been the story of combination and integration — the Japanese people have masterfully blended the customs and technologies of East Asian and Western countries with our own. No other nation can match Japan's deep experience with integration and the development it drives.

It is often said that innovation happens when different fields come together. In the case of technological fusion, a chain reaction of new value will arise if we expand opportunities for collaboration between the distinct sectors of industry, academia and government and facilitate alliances between companies from different industries. We have already seen a number of remarkable achievements in cutting-edge integrated technological fields such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. Technological innovation based on today's inclusive technology architectures cannot depend on the efforts of a single company; instead, technological innovation in these fields must be supported by national policy. Indeed, the power of innovation could be even further enhanced by promoting similar integration in the humanities, rather than limiting such efforts to the natural sciences.

If Japan is to take the lead in creating solutions for environmental issues and other global challenges, thereby increasing our positive influence in the world, our national government must implement new policies to accelerate the pace of innovation, and the best way to do this is to take a rich, multifaceted approach to integration.