A global convention called Global Innovation Ecosystem held for the first time last September had its second conference on June29 and 30. Visit their site at http://www.gies2007.com/en/index.html. The first day was at Keidanren Kaikan and the second day was held at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) where I belong. Ikoma, Arimoto, Ishikura and myself were the organizers and the “Director” that manages the whole event was Prof. Yoko Ishikura of Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University. On the first day, as the chairperson, I reported about “Innovation 25”. I followed the Director’s instruction to “talk slowly in Japanese. Don’t talk too much, it’s the report that you have to present” and did my presentation right on time. My role today was an “actor” and I said that actors are not supposed to change their lines on stage, but there were changes of order and content of the slides until the last 10 minute which was quite tense. Wonderful plan, great stage is created when everyone performs their role properly. Job well done!
After my speech, from Washington DC, Chairman Deborah Wince-Smith of Council on Competitiveness that published the “Innovate America” (so called “Palmisano Report”) made a powerful keynote speech. Then, representing Science Council of Japan, Mr. Kitazawa made a very nice speech. He spoke in Japanese, but the slides were both in English and Japanese.
After that, Chairman Ellis Rubinstein of New York Academy of Sciences, Mr. Kazuhiko Toyama who served as the COO of Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan, Mr.Nakamura from Hitachi, Mr. Bangalore from India (who happened to be quite an interesting person and a lot of friends I have in common), Professor Gu from China were the participants of the panel. Professor Ishikura who acted as the MC facilitated the panel elegantly and it zipped along very well. The whole panel was also done in English. For details, documents of the program etc., please visit "GIES2007". They plan to disclose it on video, so I hope you will enjoy it. But when you come to think back, only Mr.Kitazawa and my speech were in Japanese…
To get a grasp of the atmosphere, please visit Mr.Deguchi’s report (in Japanese) which you must be familiar with by now. As he has just returned from Russia when he wrote this, it seems that he has mistaken that my speech was also in English, and later he corrects it. Not only he participated directly from Narita after the visit to Russia, but also since my Power Point was in English, he seemed to get it wrong that I was speaking in English. But this proves that his ability to understand English is the same as Japanese, sort of a state of “trance”. Amazing!
To get a feeling of the conference, I recommend going to Mr. Deguchi’s report (in Japanese) as he is the “professional” in writing. It is more entertaining, so I’ll leave it all up to him for now.