Research and Development Policies and Strategies

We have established four areas to target in company-wide research and development to contribute to realizing a sustainable society. Our goal is to achieve so-called ambidexterity in identifying new knowledge while also developing existing businesses in greater depth. One concrete example of this is the IP landscape activities we engage in to analyze market information and information on the intellectual property of our competitors. We are actively involved in open innovation with start-ups and academia, and are working to secure competitive advantages.

Amid these efforts, the M-CFT 1 team, which is targeting creation of new businesses and new products, is:

1. Checking progress on company-wide R&D activities, including activities related to existing businesses.
2. Intensively conducting R&D activities to create new businesses
3. Building an R&D structure that can only be found in the Nippon Kayaku Group

We are working toward the three targets mentioned above.

The M-CFT 3 team, which is pursuing company-wide digital transformation (DX), recognizes the need for digital transformation of research to improve the efficiency and enable more sophisticated R&D. To accomplish this, the team is equipping laboratories with IT infrastructure and introducing electronic experiment notes, and is also building a system for using AI and MI.

The Research & Development Group is teaming up with each business group in pursuing company-wide R&D activities with the M-CFT 1 team playing the central role to implement ambidexterity and achieve balance in R&D activities.