This is about my desire to create the “Super Research Lab—A Lab Where We All Create an Exciting Future Together,” which I spoke about at the TOKYO Smart City Forum. Since it’s the middle of the night at the end of the year, I’m posting this however I please (*^^*)

I want to create a participatory platform that connects universities, research institutes, communities, and people around the world—a “Let’s Create an Exciting Future Together” lab. When I launched “Learning of Tomorrow,” my next goal was to create a “Super Research Institute”!

As we stand at the threshold of Society 5.0—epitomized by technologies such as AI and IoT—we need an organization capable of creating something new. Just as we were considering this, the COVID-19 pandemic struck humanity, making the creation of a new world in the “with COVID-19” and “post-COVID-19” eras our top priority.

Until now, the government, universities, and corporate research institutes have each addressed these issues individually. However, might we not need an approach that differs from that of highly specialized research institutions grounded in advanced academia?

A research institute where everyone—including users—connects to build a new society. We want to create a platform and a “reactor” that is social, open, and participatory—one that fuses diverse insights and the unique strengths of many people to generate new technologies, services, content, businesses, and societies.

A decentralized yet collaborative network of labs. While their scope is broad—ranging from technology development to solving social issues and creating new services—their common threads are digital technology, real-world implementation, and collaborative creation.

○ Creating an Exciting Future

We place a strong emphasis on creating an “exciting future” and bringing it to fruition in society. Focusing primarily on the digital field, we will foster innovation by integrating technology, design, business, and policy. Rather than the closed, high-end academic research that universities have traditionally pursued, we aim to become an unprecedented research institution grounded in the characteristics of digital networks—namely, “openness, decentralization, and participation.” We prioritize connecting diverse stakeholders and, through this collaboration, fostering the creation of services, products, content, organizations, social initiatives, and talent.

○Platform

It will foster a participatory community and function as a platform. It will also serve as a venue for matching challenges, ideas, technology, funding, skills, and people. We will establish three communities—universities and research institutes, the field, and stakeholders—and aim to achieve the following goals.

■A community of universities and research institutes around the world

We will collaborate with 100 research institutes around the world to create a community that transcends organizational boundaries.

■The World Is Our Playing Field

We will establish labs around the world, whether virtual or physical.

We will forge connections with local governments and other entities in the field, treating society as a whole as our laboratory.

■Researcher for Everyone

The "1 Million Researchers" Initiative. Everyone—from middle-aged women to children—is a researcher. Become a "Lifelong Seeker" and carry a second researcher business card.