Toward an Era of New Value Created through Industry-Academia Collaboration

The Element Strategy Initiative: To Form Core Research Centers collaborates with other projects, including the Research and Development Project for Innovative Structural Materials under METI and Structural Materials for Innovation, which is one of the projects in the Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) under the Cabinet Office. Both the industrial world and METI have high hopes for this collaboration.

METI has recently been promoting the concept of “connected industries.” The premise of this concept is that connecting diverse industries and services will create new value that can be used to help solve various problems in society. Materials are becoming increasingly important for this movement, as well.

This initiative is at the forefront of full-fledged interdisciplinary collaboration, which is vital for strengthening Japan’s international competitiveness in the field of materials and may be a good example of how merging fundamentals with applications can produce a new format for collaborative projects between industry and academia.

I expect that this symposium will provide further opportunities for collaboration among industry and academia, and I sincerely hope for your success.