Latest movement of Open Innovation - Fujitsu Executive Forum 2018 -Transforming Your business through Co-creation

Digital technologies radically change the way companies do business. Those businesses that fail to adapt will fall behind. How can organizations set out their new growth strategies? How can they leverage open innovation for this purpose?

To address this question, the Fujitsu Executive Forum was held at the Peninsula Tokyo on May 18, 2018. The event, titled "Transforming your business through co-creation: Latest movement of Open Innovation," featured two guest speakers: Henry Chesbrough, Adjunct Professor and Faculty Director at the University of California, Berkeley, known as the "father of open innovation," and Andrew Fursman, co-founder and CEO of 1QBit, a quantum computing software company in Vancouver, Canada. Tatsuya Tanaka, the President and Representative Director of Fujitsu, opened the event and Yoshikuni Takashige, Fujitsu's Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Vision introduced Fujitsu's open innovation initiatives. In addition, Hoong Chuin Lau, Professor of Information Systems at Singapore Management University, joined a panel discussion with Chesbrough, Fursman and Takashige. The participated business leaders shared their views on the practice of open innovation with the speakers at a networking luncheon after the Forum.

'Co-Creation for Success:' Transforming Business with Open Innovation

During his opening speech, Tanaka, stated Fujitsu's corporate message this year: "Co-Creation for Success." And he emphasized the importance of people and organizations working together to create new value for business and society.

He then introduced the guest speakers and panelist. All are thought leaders in the co-creation and the implementation of open innovation.

Tatsuya Tanaka

The first guest speaker, Henry Chesbrough, Faculty Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, is known as the first person to promote the concept of Open Innovation in the world. The second guest speaker, Andrew Fursman has been collaborating with Fujitsu and the University of Toronto on AI cloud business applying quantum computing technology. The third guest and panelist, Singapore Management University professor Lau, the lead investigator of the Urban Computing & Engineering Center of Excellence (UCE CoE), works with Fujitsu and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), to develop solutions for urban and social challenges.

Fujitsu's Tanaka told the audience that he hoped that ideas discussed at the forum could "help you develop your new business strategy," and welcomed the first speaker, Chesbrough, to the stage.

Open Innovation and Business Transformation

In 2003, Chesbrough published his first book, Open Innovation: The New imperatives for Creating and Profiting from Technology. He described the concept of open innovation in this book before any other researcher had noted its rise. Interest in open innovation has grown dramatically since the book first hit the market, and now the concept is widely implemented in business.

Henry Chesbrough

Chesbrough compared open innovation to the traditional way of innovation generally taking place in companies. This is usually a closed process, with work mostly done by internal R&D departments. Original ideas often end up on the shelf, unused.

Chesbrough illustrated the closed process with an image of a funnel turned on its side. Many research projects enter the funnel from its wide-open mouth, but only a limited number of finished products or technologies come out through the narrow opening at the other end.

He explained that, on the other hand, open innovation could be depicted as a funnel with a number of holes on its wall, through which knowledge and technologies flexibly pass in and out. There are two types of knowledge flows--the outside-in and the inside-out.

"If we have a business model that will benefit from other people's knowledge, we will find ways to access that knowledge and bring it in," he said. "If we have internal knowledge that is not going to be used by our organization, we might allow that to go outside for others to access. Open innovation allows both sides to productively utilize others' knowledge."

He further compared the open-innovation model with Michael Porter's concept of the value chain that was described in his book, "Competitive Advantage."

According to Porter, a competitive advantage for a company is derived from the value chain. It is a series of internal processes adding value to products.

But customers are absent in the value chain, Chesbrough pointed out. From his perspective, innovation today must have customers at the center, and he calls this innovation model, "service value web," against Porter's value chain. "Instead of a value chain, I would propose a services value web that is not a linear process but is instead an iterative process and at the center of this process is the desire to create a superior customer experience," he said.

Chesbrough noted that this is not a new idea. There have been predecessors who emphasized the importance of customer value. Peter Drucker is one. A colleague of Michael Porter from Harvard, Ted Levine, also expressed this quite vividly, saying, "When a customer buys a drill to make a hole in the wall, the drill is the product but the utility is the hole that you achieve by using the drill."

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Chesbrough further developed the argument for customer value by questioning whether the ownership of physical assets really pays off in the digital age. "Being a good American from California, I also own a car," Chesbrough remarked. "I drive my car about 12,000 miles a year, about 400 hours each year. A year has more than 8,000 hours, so I am using my car less than 5% of the time. But I paid 100% of the taxes, the fuel, the service and other expenses." Chesbrough suggests that it would be more economically sound if we paid only as much of an asset as we used. That is, we do not own the asset but are allowed to use it as a service.

GE and Rolls Royce, for example, lease jet engines in a program called "Power by the Hour." It allows airlines and other users to take the asset (a jet engine that would cost tens of millions of dollars) off of their balance sheets and put it back on their supplier's balance sheet. Thus, a fixed cost is transformed into a variable cost, said Chesbrough.

"Amazon Web Service is another example," he said. "Instead of paying 100% of the server costs, Amazon will now rent out access to its infrastructure to customers and that again spreads the fixed costs over more volume and lowers the cost for the customers."

Chesbrough counts this service-oriented externalization of internal assets as a key aspect of open innovation. The strategy attracts more business users to Amazon's digital platform and gives Amazon strong advantage in the market, he pointed out as he showed a graphic that compares Amazon's API ecosystem with that of rival Walmart. The graphic shows Amazon's API users growing to dominate the space while Walmart's API users are driven to one corner. "If you are Walmart, this suggests you have a real problem you need to think about," said Chesbrough.

In what Chesbrough calls "open service innovation," many venders and partners work together to improve customer value. Here it is important for a company to consider its business as a service, putting customers at the center in the "co-creation" process. Outside-in helps with economies of scope and the one-stop shop idea, without taking risks in sales or inventory. Inside-out helps with economies of scale, too, sharing those fixed costs over more transactions, more activity, Chesbrough noted.

Toward the end of his speech, Chesbrough introduced Open Innovation Gateway – Powered by FUJITSU (OIG), one of Fujitsu's open innovation initiatives in Silicon Valley. Chesbrough has been supporting the initiative since it was in the planning stages. "OIG focuses on how to open up the possibilities for co-creation at a pace of start-ups with customers, talented individuals and progressive institutions in Silicon Valley and beyond. So, it redefined the way companies collaborate for innovation with faster processes," said Chesbrough.

As an example of applying co-creation to a business model, Chesbrough briefly introduced a case study of a major Japanese life insurance company. The company worked with professionals in Silicon Valley and customers from the early planning stage to proof of concept and successfully delivered a new concept. "It's too soon to say it's going to be a great big new business, and it's not too soon to say it's deepening the dialogue between the customer, the life insurance company and Fujitsu," he said. "They are all learning new things about each other and about the opportunities in the market."

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In closing, Chesbrough cited three key tips for companies pursuing open innovation:

Focus on customer value more than products or technologies. Do not rely on market research and customer surveys but engage with customers to learn what they truly want.
Share high fixed-cost internal assets, including brands, distribution channels and the pool of patents to accelerate growth.
Explore new opportunities outside your current business model, taking a lean start-up approach with small-scale proof of concepts. In order to achieve this, build an organization capable of quick decision-making and leverage knowledge from customers, start-ups, universities and other outside experts.

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'Symbiogenesis': How Small Start-ups and Large Organizations Can Co-Create

Following Chesbrough, Fursman, CEO of a Canadian quantum computing software company 1QBit, came to the stage. Last year 1QBit and Fujitsu began collaboration around the business of Fujitsu's latest computing technology, called Digital Annealer. He used nature as a metaphor to illustrate how co-creation could work.

Andrew Fursman

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"There are many examples within nature of large individuals and small individuals working together for mutual benefit, for example, symbiosis of trees and mushrooms in a forest," he said. "They collaborate for the health of the forest, in which sometimes trees deposit energy down into the mycelial structure of mushroom colonies in good times and then withdraw that energy back, not necessarily by the same tree but for the benefit of the entire community," Fursman explained.

Fursman pointed to another example of symbiosis in the human body. It is endosymbiosis of the mitochondria in host cells. He said. "Cells and mitochondria used to be individual organisms, but the smaller component, the mitochondria, which was originally external, came together and created something new where the endosymbiont became almost like an organ inside the larger organism. This helped cells function so successfully that you don't see cells with no mitochondria, and you don't find mitochondria outside of cells. Together they have come to build something that's much more successful than either of them independently to the point where they no longer exist independently at all."

Fursman called this successful unity of two organisms "symbiogenesis" and equated it with business co-creation between two companies.

Then, he recalled the year 2012, when he co-founded 1QBit. At that time, few people envisioned any practical uses for quantum computers. Still fewer imagined the need for software development kits for them.

"We saw a trend that was the slowing down of Moore's Law and the increasing of specialization in hardware processors," said Fursman. "We knew that it was very difficult to understand how to interact with all these different devices, and yet we understood that these devices would be incredibly powerful if connected to the appropriate industrial problems. So, we wanted to build the bridge between industry and these new types of hardware, and we knew that if we were to be successful doing this, we would have to start this project before the hardware existed."

This idea was a bold one, but Fursman said he was confident. "These companies which were developing quantum computers would be willing to partner with us once they had invented the hardware that we assumed they were going to be creating."

In fact, Fursman's client list includes the top names in the industry, one of which is Fujitsu. 1QBit has been collaborating with Fujitsu on the latter's quantum-inspired computing technology, "Digital Annealer."

"Fujitsu's Digital Annealer was exactly the sort of device that we had envisioned," said Fursman. The collaboration between the start-up and the established company inevitably encounter challenges, including differences in corporate culture, but Fursman is positive about the pairing producing results. He noted that Fujitsu and 1QBit had worked together with a higher goal in mind.

"When you imagine the partnership that we would have with this size of an organization, you may see it as unequal. But just like in nature, an unequal partnership can still lead to mutual benefit," Fursman said. "Although it's well-known that most start-ups will fail, large companies can't be complacent either. In fact, even the top 500 companies around the world are struggling for survival in rapidly changing business environments. We must find ways to support one another and to work together for mutual benefit."

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Fursman said for co-creation to succeed, companies have to find alignment of their incentives. "That means when one company wins, the other company wins; when one company loses, the other company loses, so that there is really one-team mentality."

Lastly, Fursman noted that in Canada, universities are playing an important role in supporting large companies looking for start-ups to work with.

"Our relationship with Fujitsu was facilitated through a university, and many universities are starting to have special programs designed specifically to help start-ups to find partnerships with larger organizations," he said. "At the University of Toronto, we have the Creative Destruction Lab. The lab has already produced a very large number of companies in a small number of years. Though these companies are sometimes less of a company and more of a technology, they can work well inside a larger ecosystem or inside a larger organization. This business symbiosis provides real opportunity for success as we saw in nature."

In closing, Fursman said, "my message that I want you to take away is from the word symbiogenesis, which really means living together in order to create something new. I would love to have an opportunity to explore co-creation together."

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Key Success Factors for Digital Transformation and Co-creation

Next up, Takashige, Fujitsu's Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Vision, talked about the key success factors for digital transformation, based on the analysis of a global executive survey Fujitsu recently conducted. He also explained Fujitsu's initiatives for co-creation.

Yoshikuni Takashige

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In February Fujitsu conducted the survey of over 1,500 executives in 16 counties to explore success factors for digital transformation. "We found common characteristics about organizations that had delivered successful outcomes through digital transformation," Takashige said.

He pointed out six key success factors, comprising Leadership, People, Agility, Business Integration, Ecosystem and Value from Data. Takashige called these factors Digital Muscles. He emphasized, "These are different from the muscles that enterprises have already developed. To succeed in digital, enterprises have to build these new muscles."

On average, online companies are much stronger than traditional companies in their digital muscles. Especially, the gap is the most evident in the capability of developing "Ecosystem," which directly relates to co-creation, he said.

Drilling this down, Takashige pointed out that "both online and traditional companies regard technology companies as the most important partners for digital transformation. But traditional companies are far less interested in partnerships with start-ups, companies in different industries, governments, research institutions and consortiums, while online companies place importance on partnerships with these types of organizations. Yet, there are also some non-online companies that are successful in digital transformation. They are actively building partnerships with these organizations. When you want to succeed in digital transformation, it is the key how you develop an effective ecosystem."

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Takashige then prompted the audience to look at undergoing fundamental changes in industrial structures. It is a shift from vertically integrated value chains to distributed ecosystems, and this shift is triggered by data, he said.

For example, vertically integrated financial institutions have traditionally offered banking services. But today, we see a large number of Fintech companies offering new services. Even more, new types of platform banks have emerged, providing basic banking services as cloud services. Also, digital platformers like Amazon and Alibaba have become alternative choices of providing customer interfaces for banking services. You can see here a distributed ecosystem of players connected through APIs. There is an emergence of a distributed API economy, Takashige noted.

He emphasized that what Chesbrough called "open service innovation" or an ecosystem-based innovation is essential for businesses today. "Fujitsu is committed to co-creation of human-centric value with our ecosystem partners, taking the open service innovation approach. We are implementing many co-creation projects, for example, an AI-enabled medical diagnosis support system," said Takashige. Fujitsu is running various programs to build ecosystems and accelerate open innovation with start-ups and research institutes. Fujitsu's Open Innovation Gateway in Silicon Valley, which Chesbrough mentioned, is one of the key vehicles for the purpose, he noted.

In closing, Takashige stressed the importance of 'trust' as a key for achieving successful co-creation through an ecosystem.

"It's important to build a solid foundation of trust if you want to carry out co-creation and open innovation successfully," he said. "Ultimately, innovation is created by connections of people even in Silicon Valley. A trustful relationship can accelerate the collaboration to find solutions to problems and deliver innovation. We wish to build such a relationship with you, and look forward to an opportunity to work together for your next innovation project."

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Panel Discussion

Takashige then moderated a panel discussion featuring Chesbrough, Fursman and Lau.

Yoshikuni Takashige :
Before we start, I'd like Professor Lau to briefly introduce himself.

Hoong Chuin Lau :
Yes. First of all, thank you for inviting me to be on this panel. My name is Lau, a professor at Singapore Management University. It's a university of technology-oriented social science and management. I am on the faculty at the School of Information Systems. My background is in Computer Science. I did my Doctor of Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT).

My relationship with Fujitsu dates back 20-plus years. The Singapore government sent me to study at TIT and also as part of the program to be a visiting scholar at Fujitsu Labs under the AI group. Little did I realize that 20 years down the line I have another opportunity to work with Fujitsu as lead investigator at the Urban Computing and Engineering Center of Excellence, which was funded by Fujitsu and the Singapore government.

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Yoshikuni Takashige :
Thank you, Professor Lau. Now let us start the discussion. Today, I have prepared questions taken from the audience. So, let me lead the discussion with some of the questions. Here is the first one: How does open innovation help a company to find growth opportunities?

Can you take this question and provide us with a few examples, Professor Chesbrough?

Henry Chesbrough :
Yes. One of recent examples is from the pharmaceutical industry to develop new drugs. A company in the United States called Eli Lilly created a new process where they invited entrepreneurs who had a compound that they thought could be the basis for a new drug to come with their compound and Lily would perform all the normal tests that it performs on its own compounds for that compound and give the results to the entrepreneur at no charge. For things that are strongly positive--very, very high results compared to the other compounds-- they now have an opportunity to pursue a discussion with the entrepreneur. So, what this really becomes is a way to build deal flow for possible new compounds at no charge to Lily.

The second example is of NASA. Recently, they had a crowdsourcing competition for a way to predict the better incidents of solar flares from the sun. And the resulting challenge was won by somebody not from an astrophysics background, not from an aeronautics background, but somebody who was a weather forecaster on earth. Then, an internal identity crisis rose among the technical staff in NASA. They asked themselves what their identity in NASA is if other people outside of NASA are the ones solving these important problems. This type of the internal identity question is very human, but we must be aware of it when practicing open innovation.

The last example is from the energy sector. An Italian energy company called Enel is working a lot on renewable energy and developing a new business model in the area of electric vehicles. For an owner of an electric vehicle, Enel can offer to plug into the car's battery when the car is not being used. And then when the person gets ready to go home at the end of the day, they (Enel agents) go back and refill the battery for the owner to take home. This way the vehicle becomes portable on-demand elastic storage for energy. And the electric vehicle owners can get paid to allow his or her car to be accessed in this way from the utility.

The common success factor I think is taking a very different view of what we might do together with our partners when we try to innovate and collaborate. In all of this, there are opportunities for new value propositions, new co-creation.

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Yoshikuni Takashige :
Thank you, Professor Chesbrough. Now, since we have three panelists from different regions today, I think we can learn about regional differences in open innovation. Professor Lau, can you share with us your view on open innovation in Singapore?

Hoong Chuin Lau :
Yes. I'd like to introduce two national initiatives that Singapore recently announced. The first one is the open innovation platform. Basically, it is to try to facilitate collaboration between problem owners, which are companies, with solution providers, which are typically ICT companies. Using a crowdsourcing platform, they match the requirement from the problem owners to the solutions that can potentially be provided by ICT firms. An agency within the Singapore government manages the matchmaking program in a very effective way.

The second national initiative is AI Singapore. Its purpose is to try to encourage companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to embark on an AI journey together with institutes of higher learning. One of their programs is called AI 100 Experiments, in which companies would define problems, as many as 100, and they try to interest researchers from the institutes or the universities to collaborate. The government will put in money to fund the university or the research institute, and the company will have to match the fund. The collaboration will take about 12 to 18 months to deliver a so-called minimal-viable product.

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Our Center of Excellence is also another national initiative, in which Fujitsu, Singapore Management University and A*STAR are working together to solve some of urban challenges. It's a co-creation story. Each side contributes the relevant technology, and we try to build a system that could provide eventually an opportunity for Fujitsu to take it to market in the near future.

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Yoshikuni Takashige :
Thank you, Professor Lau. It looks like when you think of co-creation in Singapore, the partnership with the government or some participation in the national initiatives is the key. Professor Chesbrough, how about co-creation in the United States?

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Henry Chesbrough :
I think in the United States, it's much more bottom up than top down, with the exception perhaps of the defense sector. I see a lot of the basic research has shifted from internal corporate laboratories to research universities and so more and more, the earliest stages of the technology are being nurtured in the universities.

For companies, this is a great opportunity. Though universities are terrible at developing products, if you can engage and connect with universities, you can really get some excellent early research that might stimulate new possibilities for you. Andrew had a nice talk about aligning incentives between different parties. The universities are good ones to align with because they will never compete with you in launching products into the market, so you can really build good mutually-beneficial relationships with them as partners.

Andrew Fursman :
I think many people underestimate the value that exists there and, in fact, the first 20 employees or so of 1QBit came directly from their Ph.D. programs and actually before they had graduated. We were able to engage with them through a government-supported program that exists within Canada. When you are trying to do something completely new, going and finding somebody who has 10 years' experience doing that is impossible. What's important is to find people who are already in the mode of learning and exploring, who are not accustomed to expensive lifestyles and who are very excited to be able to get their hands on some of the data. Graduate students are smart and deserving to be part of your organization for the long term. That's an incredible resource and something that in my view is underutilized.

Yoshikuni Takashige :
Let us change the focus of discussion onto intellectual property rights (IPR). We cannot avoid talking about it when we talk about open innovation. What should we consider in order to use IPR with open innovation while protecting confidential internal knowledge?

Henry Chesbrough :
When you are engaged in collaboration with others, it's very important to have a sophisticated approach to your intellectual property. Although I am known for open innovation, I do not suggest that you be open with everything that you are doing, but rather have domains where you can be very open and domains where you understand with your employees that here we must be more careful.

One example is IMEC in Belgium, which is the European research center for all semiconductor-related research. IMEC has a lot of government funding, which gives them access to state-of-the-art equipment, but they also do a lot of collaborative work with companies. In the IMEC model, they have a base level of research, where everybody working with them can get access for no charge. But then they have individual programs that they do and anybody who contributes and helps to fund the program will have royalty-free but nonexclusive rights to that work. And then as you get closer to the end application, they will do individual consulting-based work to extend some research for a particular use. And if you participate with that, you can get exclusive ownership of that particular piece or application that in turn draws from the underlying background research.

You can think of it as different layers from a little bit of exclusivity at the top but drawing from a much wider base, as well. This is what I mean by a sophisticated approach to IP. It's not completely open. It's not completely closed. You get more IP protection the more you directly contribute and participate to make this work successful.

Andrew Fursman :
When it comes to IPR, I suggest that you should avoid focusing too much on the risks of doing something. You can find ways to overcome challenges if you have aligned incentives. For example, a large company might say to a start-up, "We would like to be able to fund some of this work." And they continue, "We will work together and deeply collaborate. Anything that comes out from this work that can be applied to our industry is something that we own and anything that's outside of this specific area, which you would decide upfront, is something that could be used by you to go and work with other people."

That's extremely valuable, especially from the perspective of a start-up, because of being able to go and say this has real value: Look, it's being used by this big company that you respect. Start-ups will be willing to make very generous terms in order to be able to demonstrate the fact that what they are doing has value. There are always creative ways to be able to get around this, but I would just hate to see some of the legal issues stop us from being able to progress and actually make this happen.

Hoong Chuin Lau :
As far as our center is concerned, IPR is indeed a very challenging issue, because we have to deal with four parties on IPR: Fujitsu, Singapore Management University, A*STAR and any project partner.

But I think oftentimes we spend a lot of time with IP discussions to the neglect of something that is even more important. The solution itself is actually not the most precious part. Then, what's the most precious part about the technology? It is the person developing that solution. Whether you are talking about the graduate student or the researcher or even the faculty, these are the people that you should go after to continue to hone your products, to continue to extend it for a bigger and more extensive use.

I would suggest that rather than talking so much about IP, we should try to go one step behind and say after you have developed this project, "We will hire this research engineer." And it comes with the person's knowledge and a lot of experience. From there, you could even go further.

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Andrew Fursman :
There's just one practical point that I want to add from my experience. Co-ownership of IP is exceptionally difficult. I would prefer typically to say, "It's yours, and I have a license within a certain area; or it's mine and you have a license in a certain area." But co-ownership in my experience has led to the tragedy that it's nobody's and so that creates some real challenges. I think either one is often better than sort of that nebulous middle ground.

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Yoshikuni Takashige :
Let us here change our topic to how large organizations can make timely decisions with regards to open innovation. What do you think large companies should do to accelerate their decision-making to meet the pace of start-ups?

Henry Chesbrough :
You must create new processes that you don't already have in your organization. This will take time, and it does slow down the process for using this. But once you have done one activity, when you start the second and the third, you will get to use them a second time and a third time and the time will reduce. This way, you will develop what Takashige-san called the digital muscle.

The second thing to say is when particularly you are collaborating with a university or a start-up on some new area, some new development, it's not going to turn into a big business overnight. So, focusing on proofs of concept for the early tangible demonstration is a good way to start to be faster. You need to create simplified processes for the early stages of the proof of concept so that those can indeed happen more quickly and then give you the information and the results that you can then say, okay this does look promising. Now we can bring the more established processes to bear, as we try to grow and scale the results of this.

Andrew Fursman :
Sometimes it feels like an organization is spending $100,000 worth of investigative resources in order to determine whether they should make a $50,000 investment. You can actually do the entire project with a start-up faster than you can do the analysis through your large organizational process. So being comfortable failing, and being comfortable having a null result from your experiment can actually save you significant amounts of time and energy and resources, specifically money. Sometimes for start-ups, six months can be an eternity and taking six months to hammer out a deal, they might be a completely different company by the time that they are out the back end of this. Even if things don't work, we still learn a lot together in co-creation. And if we do discover something that does work together, then we have an opportunity to grow together that we would not have had if we did not engage in the co-creation with each other.

Yoshikuni Takashige :
It's about time to close this forum. May I have final words from each of you? Professor Lau, do you want to go first?

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Hoong Chuin Lau :
Okay. Last month I watched a Hollywood movie with my family back in Singapore. In the movie, several heroes finally came together to fight the evil. The previous movies were all very egocentric, with one-person hero. But this is the first one where all the heroes came together. Why? It's because the task ahead of them is really very daunting. In the movie, you can see that they really know how to collaborate and communicate with each other. You might see here a model of co-creation. I think it is important for us to take messages like that even if it is a Hollywood movie.

Andrew Fursman :
Mine is simply, "Just to do it." Overcome whatever your hesitations are and go and try and make some of these collaborations. And again, even from the worst-case scenario, you can learn a valuable lesson. The best possible way to get started is to just do it.

Henry Chesbrough :
I do believe that open innovation is becoming the new approach to innovation, in contrast to the earlier closed model, where we do everything in our own laboratory and take it to the market entirely on our own. I think this more open process is how innovation is happening. Not only in Silicon Valley but also here in Japan, in Korea, in China, Singapore, Europe, Latin and South America, even Africa. So, this is where the world is going. That means you must also go there. And as you think about these open-innovation processes, add to that a chance to co-create with your customers. And if you understand better and work more closely with your customers, even the failures will be helpful to you. And I think you will find your customers thank you and will engage more deeply and share more with you that will help you be more successful in the future. Open innovation and co-creation with your customer are two good ways to go forward coming out of our session.

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Yoshikuni Takashige :
Thank you, Professor Lau, Mr. Fursman and Professor Chesbrough for sharing your interesting views.

Today we have discussed the theme of how we can transform our business through open innovation. I hope ideas and thoughts from today's event provides you with productive hints when you create your new business strategy. Thank you for your attendance through the sessions.

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Latest movement of Open Innovation - Fujitsu Executive Forum 2018 -Transforming Your business through Co-creation

'Co-Creation for Success:' Transforming Business with Open Innovation

Open Innovation and Business Transformation

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'Symbiogenesis': How Small Start-ups and Large Organizations Can Co-Create

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Key Success Factors for Digital Transformation and Co-creation

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Panel Discussion

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