[ITmedia Business Online] Difficulty communicating? Are you strong because you understand technology? --NEC/IBIDEN's answer to whether or not researchers should be allowed to develop businesses...

There are excellent techniques. There is also a track record of developing this technology into a major business. Despite this, new businesses that will become the next pillar are having a hard time getting off the ground.

Even after investing in research and development and conducting repeated demonstrations, there are many themes that fail to reach a commercial outlet. NEC, Japan's leading electronics manufacturer, and IBIDEN (Ogaki City, Gifu Prefecture), which boasts a large market share in IC package substrates, which are the foundation of semiconductor chips, were faced with this issue.

``Large companies will die if they don't create new areas of growth while still making money.'' Masashi Takagi (Head of Strategic Co-Creation Unit, Business Innovation Division) at NEC expresses his sense of crisis this way.

The high barrier of "commercialization of technology" The true nature of this lies in something other than the ``superiority or inferiority of technology''. Key people from NEC, IBIDEN, and Zero One Booster (01Booster, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), which supports companies' new business development, discussed the path to commercialization.

NEC: "If we don't create the next growth area while we're still making money, we'll die."

NEC faced the hurdle of commercializing technology. The company has previously withdrawn from the mobile phone business. Mr. Takagi of the company started a new cross-company business division around 2014 after witnessing the collapse of the mobile phone business and realizing that ``large companies will die if they don't create the next growth area while they are still making money.''

Mr. Takagi says, ``In the past, NEC was not able to conduct business development that took into account the maturity of business and technology.'' Even though the technology has reached a practical level, the resolution of who the customers are is still low. Although discussions with major customers are progressing, the accuracy of the technology is not improving. There have been cases like this.

Based on past experience, we now manage our portfolio by mapping each theme by technology maturity (TRL) and business maturity (BRL) to decide which one to move forward with next.

TRL is an index that shows the stage a technology is in, from research to practical use, on a nine-level scale. "TRL 1" refers to the stage at which the basic principle has been observed and reported, and "TRL 9" indicates the stage at which actual operation was successful.

George Goda (Representative Director of Zero One Booster), who served as the moderator, pointed out, ``At technology companies, technology that is at the paper level and technology that has already been mass-produced tend to follow the same business process.'' Since research and technology development takes 2 to 10 years, it is necessary to proceed with technologies with low TRL by calculating backward from the market in 5 to 10 years and considering whether they will lead to big business. On the other hand, for technologies with a high TRL, the question is whether a market to which they can be applied can be found now.