Koji Ikuta
Professor, Department of Information Physics and Computing Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Many of my former students and young friends have their own unique personalities. One such young woman decided to become a doctor after completing her master's course in mechanics at Nagoya University. First, she became an administrative scrivener to earn a living until she could pass the entrance examination. Two years later, she entered the Department of Medicine in Nagoya University to major in surgery, and then went on to the US to continue her studies. Meanwhile, she also worked as a paramedic. She was liked by the other paramedics and firefighters and was allowed to stay in the fire station, which saved her the rental expenses and commuting time. In her emails to me, she described her enjoyable trip by a red hook-and-ladder truck to go to a hamburger grill. Then she moved to a hospital in Colombia, where the shortage of surgeons gave her opportunities to perform many operations and thus helped her to improve her skills. After working in a hospital in the US, she returned to Japan and is now actively working at Nagoya University Hospital offering frontline emergency medical services.
Another woman who studied nursing science at Osaka University went on to become a head nurse in a large hospital. During her work, she considered that rehabilitation using arcade games such as "whack-a-mole" might be a good way to greatly improve the physical capabilities, brain functions, and mental activities of patients. To verify this possibility, she moved to a small day-care facility and worked with the Department of Medicine of Kyushu University to accumulate evidence. Although there has been little support from either the public or private sector, she is working hard to expand the use of this rehabilitation method.
One more story of a young woman is as follows. After giving a speech at the G20 commemoration international conference in Seoul, I took a limousine taxi to go to the airport. Suddenly, a graduate student of Seoul National University rushed into the same taxi and started to pitch her proposal for short-term research in my laboratory, holding her resume and a thick report file in her hands. Seeing her eagerness, I advised her to proceed with the paperwork at the university before bidding her goodbye. No more than two months later, I received a call from her on Christmas Day. She had already moved into accommodation in Hongo, which is near my university. She came to my laboratory the next day and started research on nanomachines. Four months later, she returned to South Korea after obtaining reasonably good results for a novice researcher.
As can be seen in the above three real-life stories, the main characters are all women. Their intellect, decisiveness and agility are remarkable. These days most of the people at my lectures and presentations who bombard me with questions are women. They do not hesitate to do things that other people considered to be low-return, impractical, or uncool. Ryoma Sakamoto, one of the most famous samurai, who played an active role in fomenting the Meiji Restoration, is said to have had such traits. Large companies and organizations in Japan today do not have many people with similar traits. Exceptional companies with Ryoma-like individuals at the helm and in other supporting roles are growing.
Allocating important work to this type of person (not limited to women) and giving them opportunities to play an active role is common in Western and Asian countries, except in Japan. A typical example would be a venture business. However, true venture businesses are rarely seen in Japan.
In Western countries, founders of venture businesses do not have to carry debts even if they fail. They can try again, learning from their failures. In contrast, managers in Japan who fail are burdened with debts. Most of such entrepreneurs in Japan do not have a second chance and remain disgraced in society. Unfortunately, this is the reality in Japan. This drives world-class researchers, engineers, and doctors to leave Japan and go to Europe or America to use more practically their skills and technologies.
Johnson & Johnson, a leading medical equipment maker, does not launch its original research projects. Instead, it has been successful by buying out venture companies that have the potential to grow and by investing heavily in their development. The firm typically has more than 200 projects in progress at any given time.
Although the Japanese business environment is conservative, in-house ventures are possible. My suggestion is as follows: solicit applications from across the company and allocate substantial resources to promising project teams for several years. Impose no threat of a pay cut or being fired, even if they fail. Let them work decisively under the conditions that the results would not affect the next selection and that all applicants would be equally screened. If they succeed in starting a new business, a dedicated organization or subsidiary should be set up to grow the business.
The author has no experience of management but offers this suggestion here as a way of combating the stagnation in large companies in Japan. I introduced examples of adventurous women at the beginning of this article. Meanwhile, most Japanese companies are managed by people who tend to be smart but timid. Perhaps they cannot survive the global competition.
Risk-taking in the medical and biotechnology equipment business
Although Japan imports more medical equipment than it exports, it has huge potentiality for next-generation leading- edge medical equipment. If Japanese companies take the risks to commercialize such possibilities and the government supports them by speeding up the approval process for clinical trials, Japan could dominate the global market. The medical equipment business could thus become a core industry of the Japanese economy in the near future, like the semiconductor industry and the automobile industry in the past.
The potentiality does not depend on the technologies possessed by existing medical equipment manufacturers alone. Rather, it depends on key technologies for medical and biotechnology devices based on new concepts for which there are not yet products or markets. In general, medical devices are rarely developed by medical equipment manufacturers alone, but comprise many state-of-the-art components developed by manufacturers in other industries. This is similar to automobiles and PCs, which are built using components from many other manufacturers.
The most valuable assets of medical equipment manufacturers are their connections and sales networks with people in medical sites such as doctors. Unlike home appliances, the relationship between a manufacturer and user continues long after the sale; many medical devices need periodic maintenance. In this respect, the medical equipment business is similar to that of the auto industry, but the approval process for release is troublesome and requires much expense and time.
The competitiveness of Japanese industry today depends largely on its precision machinery and mechatronics. For example, automobiles move smoothly thanks to these technologies. If we use them in medical engineering, we can build the world's strongest new industry.
Enormous amounts of taxpayers' money have been poured into various research areas in which medical engineering is implicated. One of the research areas is regenerative medicine using iPS cells and cell sheets, which is expected to be able to regenerate organs of a person from their own cells. A Nobel Prize has been awarded for a study on iPS cells. Another area is structural biology, in which gene sequences and their functions are clarified.
Currently, cell culturing and most biotech experiments depend heavily on human work. There today exist efficient devices with planarly arranged multiple micro-pipettes each of which can carry out different chemical experiments in parallel. However, it is still difficult to accelerate culturing of different kinds of cells and response experiments, which are important for regenerative medicine.
This author and his coworkers have recently developed a stamp-size micro-device for regenerative medicine, which can quickly and simultaneously perform over 100 cell cultures, their tests and observations. In addition, we have proposed the concept of the chemical IC chip and succeeded in conducting a field test, in which the chip can be connected with other chemical devices similar to LEGO®* blocks to form a complete unit of sophisticated experimental equipment. In the near future, by combining both technologies, experiments on regenerative medicine can be conducted several hundreds or even thousands of times faster, and the cost will also be reduced comparably. We have as well completed a micro robot of 10-μm in size as a research tool for live cells.
If Japanese mechatronics companies become involved not only in leading-edge medical areas but also in areas of widely-used hemodialysis apparatus and other general medical equipment, both the performance and cost of such equipment could be greatly improved. Making use of IT, medical information, including clinical records, can be securely stored in the cloud computing environment, allowing patients to switch hospitals and obtain various opinions from multiple medical institutions much more easily, thus not being restricted to just one second opinion. Medical engineering is a treasure trove for risk-taking companies.
In recent years, national research institutes for leading- edge medical engineering have been set up not only in Europe and America but also in China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Surprisingly, many research themes of these institutes are based on the inventions and ideas of Japanese researchers. Once the evidence for making something new is shown, anyone can confidently proceed with its development.
Not only existing medical equipment manufacturers but also non-medical ones that have potential for next- generation medical equipment can evolve into becoming new rising medical equipment manufacturers. Even precision measurement companies such as Yokogawa can support Japan in the 21st century if they support in-house venture businesses and give "brave idiots" an important role.
*LEGO is a registered trademark of the LEGO Group.