Sustainable economic growth for Japan will hinge on fostering innovation, especially in regard to maintaining environmental quality, securing reliable supplies of energy, ensuring safety and security, and otherwise engendering peace of mind. Our innovation, meanwhile, needs to transcend individual products and technologies; it needs to provide for optimizing things holistically, as in community development.

Keidanren is promoting holistically optimized community development through its Future City Model Projects initiative. My company's hometown of Toyota City participates in that initiative and is conducting pilot projects to evaluate possible advances in energy grids and in urban infrastructure. The participating households have installed photovoltaic panels, storage batteries, and "smart house" control systems for managing energy optimally.

In addition, Toyota City is promoting energy-efficient transport options, such as plug-in hybrid vehicles, and is conducting a pilot project to evaluate information technology-based measures for minimizing carbon output in transport systems. The city is preparing to tackle further gains in optimizing energy usage and in minimizing carbon output by integrating residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and municipal facilities in networked energy grids.

Community development needs to include advances in safety and security and in peace of mind, as well as in environmental protection and in energy conservation. That means addressing a broad range of concerns, such as disaster preparedness and accommodativeness for elderly residents. It calls for a coordinated response on multiple levels, including coordination among companies in different industrial sectors; coordination among industry, academia, and government; and coordination between national and local government agencies.

The interaction among diverse participants that I am describing promises to spawn exciting innovation. We are entering an era of fading distinctions between industrial and technological sectors. Companies and other sources of ideas and technology will come together in previously inconceivable combinations. Planners and engineers who might once have focused narrowly on individual disciplines will work together, stimulating one another and broadening each other's horizons.

Strong and informed leadership will be indispensable in mobilizing multidisciplinary resources effectively. Holistically optimized community development will require head planners who will oversee the work from a comprehensive perspective. The head planners will have the final say on proposals for such matters as the routing of roads and railways and the positioning of such community features as parks, schools, and hospitals. They will make those and other decisions with an eye to smoothing the movement of people and goods and otherwise optimizing community life.

An important benefit of the kinds of initiatives that are under way in Toyota City is that they nurture planning talent. As communities throughout Japan undertake similar initiatives, they will cultivate a growing corps of experienced planners. Those individuals will take the lead as head planners in spearheading an expanding range of locally initiated community development. And that development activity will occasion continuing innovation, fueling positive synergies across the board.