Welcome to Foresight Studios

As technology continues to shape society, organizations need to remain accountable and sustainable in their R&D strategy, and culture, moving forward. With insights from key thought leaders and experts in the field, Foresight Studios illustrates how business leaders can develop sustainable R&D strategies – and make innovation real through partnerships and platforms.

With the momentum of technological development constantly shaping our present and future, sophisticated technology is becoming progressively embedded in our everyday lives. With that comes new responsibilities and risks in the approaches we take to apply technology to new and already-existing applications. 

This first issue of our new quarterly publication, Foresight Studios Magazine, brings insights to forward-thinking business leaders that prioritize enriching human experiences through innovation and technological advancement. It explores ways of applying technologies that use sustainable infrastructure and AI to interact with human emotional life. At our heart, Foresight Studios is dedicated to sharing knowledge that builds connections through personalized, immersive experiences enhanced by technology.

Seeing what’s now, understanding what’s next, shaping the future

Each issue of Foresight Studios Magazine aims to help current and future leaders understand tomorrow’s implications of today’s technological landscape. This will highlight the collateral impacts of the now, the next and the future. Foresight Studios is the platform established by NTT DATA, part of the NTT Group, one of the top 5 technology providers in the world. We work by sharing expertise from industry thought leaders – research scientists, authors, academics and business leaders – as well as from within the NTT ecosystem, predominantly centered in Japan with a whole global network of R&D at hand.

The theme of our first issue, Smart Future, depicts the concept of the future constructed by our technology-enabled progress and hyper-connectivity. This transcends industrial, geographical and societal boundaries. The issue discusses the benefits of groundbreaking research and new applications of AI and technology across different industries, which R&D departments and leaders can adopt to optimize operations. We are already seeing how technological innovation is transforming vital sectors, such as healthcare. In this issue of Foresight Studios, Joe Alexander, distinguished scientist from MEI Lab at NTT Research, highlights his research and aims using digital twin technology to treat, predict and even prevent cardiac diseases. 

Other areas of development for AI and technological innovation also include sustainable finance, investment services and beyond. Businesses can also be inspired with new and more convenient ways of reducing their carbon footprint, with sustainability an increasingly imperative requisite of their successful operation. 

“Chance favors only the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur

Innovation with purpose

Disruption has become almost the norm as we experience a global pandemic, political polarization and the climate crisis. Much of Foresight’s R&D efforts, as a result, emphasize the need for meaningful research for the future we aspire to build. This is to avoid research becoming too concentrated in one area, reducing new discoveries and breakthroughs. Instead, we should encourage diversity within research and avoid relying on AI as the only form of innovation. In this vein, Katsuhiko Kawazoe, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D Planning at NTT, shares with us his insights on technological innovation in the future, emphasizing that meaningful research constitutes a more holistic view of the world we live in. This would contribute to a smart future that opens up the opportunity for humans to live full and vibrant lives alongside technology. Organizations and R&D leaders have a role to play in the way this future is shaped. 

Takeshi Yamada highlights how AI combined with human empathy can be used to improve performance and skills. However, misuse of AI could result in the technology latching on to the imperfections of humanity, one of the primary fears in the ‘techlash’. This embodies the rapid expansion of AI and the growing hostility towards tech giants, particularly those in Silicon Valley, and their rapidly-increasing power. The concept of Society 5.0 addresses the techlash, linking the nexus of social trends including sustainability, being connected and remote, and the need for technology to be developed with more human empathy.

Changing social values and needs

The nature of our rapidly changing world has inspired both NTT’s R&D agenda and the first issue of Foresight Studios Magazine. Both are dedicated to changing social values and needs – and getting ahead of the game can bring only benefits.

NTT’s IOWN (Innovative Optical Wireless Network) initiative was introduced as a structure to develop enriched experiences, intelligent platforms and next-generation sustainable computing. This allows for greater variation in new products, and transforms the way we interact with technology and each other. This is the basis of intelligent experience, where relevant data comes straight to the user. To continue to enable these opportunities, IOWN makes it imperative that we continually invest in computing infrastructure to navigate our future needs of technology in a sustainable way. This is where the power of R&D and applied innovation comes in, addressing multiple horizons at the same time.

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

Creating an innovative and sustainable culture alongside technology has to be intentional and consequential. At NTT DATA, innovation is led by three key principles of Japanese business culture:

• Kaizen: change (kai) for the good (zen), or continuous incremental improvement
• Kaikaku: big, radical change such as fundamental changes to a production system
• Kakushin: to do something completely new and different (which Western businesses would recognise as pivoting).

As technology continues to shape our world, organizations now have a critical imperative and responsibility in shaping our future society, in a collaborative and transparent effort with customers, regulators, partners and the public. As this issue emphasizes, we have to ensure that technology enhances the sustainability of human life, rather than contradicts or threatens it: this is the crucial element of the human story, in which we must be accountable for writing the next chapter for our planet, with technology at our fingertips.

Foresight for clients, collaborators and partners

We translate R&D insights and make innovation real. For the organizations we work with, this means taking advantage of not just Foresight, but NTT DATA’s other services that integrate the best of NTT Group assets and insight with outstanding solutions from partners:

• Envisioning: R&D trends from Foresight Studios
• Exploring: experimenting and prototyping at our Origami Labs
• Making real: creating end-to-end solutions through our Bento Box partner program.

Contact us to see how we could help.