New Year's Greetings from Hitotsubashi ICS!
From Emi Osono, Dean and Professor
From all of us at Hitotsubashi ICS, I send the warmest wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2023.
In recent years, like the rest of the world, we at ICS have been navigating changes created by the pandemic. And in 2022, particularly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we strengthened our resolve to continuously prepare ourselves for events that we recognize as logically possible but which we consider to be unlikely or undesirable. Such events are often exogenous, and at other times they are the result of our own past conduct, as in the case of climate change. In both situations, with a leadership mindset we move forward with the conviction that there are always ways to contribute to solutions, or at the very least, to reduce the damage. In these challenging global circumstances, people, organizations, communities and societies are taking action, creating new systems and ways of working together, and inspiring each other: leading the way.
To develop leaders and encourage the type of leadership that the world needs—leaders who can create better futures, who embrace the complexities of reality, who take bold initiative—we at ICS are redesigning our educational curriculum to bring to the fore systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and leadership development, all with emphasis on multiple stakeholders in business and society. MBA Program Director Professor Shingo Oue and Associate Director Professor Satoko Suzuki are spearheading this endeavor, with all ICS faculty offering valuable insights. Since its foundation, Hitotsubashi ICS has emphasized the value of multiple perspectives, and in our mission statement, we reaffirm our commitment to achieving “the best of two worlds” by acting as a “bridge.” We are proud of our philosophical heritage and continue to be inspired by it.
To develop leaders who can activate change, we strengthened our MBA program with new courses in leadership and entrepreneurship. In 2022, we added the Leading for Sustainability (LS) MBA course, led by Professor Jody Ono. This course puts leadership development in the context of sustainability issues. We also launched an ICS MBA internship program with Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). In this program, our students are developing business plans to support the commercialization of the exciting scientific research conducted at OIST; many of these plans address environmental or health issues. Entrepreneur and Professor Tom Brayman will teach Entrepreneurial Management at ICS and serve as a mentor-in-residence to students who are looking to pioneer new businesses. Professor Masahiro Imaeda will teach a General Management (GM) course to help our students transition from functional experts to general managers.
We’ve welcomed still more new faculty members to enhance our educational offerings. In response to the increasing importance of geopolitical issues and social systems, Professor Kotaro Tamura will teach the course “Business, Government, and International Economy” (BGIE); Professor Kei-ichiro Inaba, a course entitled “Japanese Business and Economy 2” (JBE2); and Professor Sachiko Horiguchi, a course on Japanese Culture (JC).
To engage students in direct conversations with business leaders and practitioners, we inaugurated the NextGen Business Leadership Roundtable in partnership with Brunswick Group and J.S. Held. We also launched two new speaker series, the Dean’s Guest Speaker Series for talks on leadership and the 21st Century Skillset Workshops, both designed to enhance the development of our students as global professionals of the future.
We are working also to provide learning opportunities to a broader audience that includes diverse groups. First, we have increased our offering of Small Network Courses (SNOC), which are synchronous online courses offered to GNAM member business schools, so that GNAM students can learn from ICS faculty and ICS students can study with GNAM students. Second, we are developing pre-recorded learning materials for more widespread application of the flipped classroom approach. Professor Yoshi Fujikawa is leading us in this area, working with zero to one, the leading online learning platform.
Finally, our research activities are getting even stronger. While admitting the complexity of reality, we want to accumulate evidence and develop theories that will help us to understand this complexity as best we can. ICS researchers are working on this now. In 2022, Professor Hiroshi Ono published a paper in one of the most prestigious academic journals, and co-authored a paper with a high citation rate (high impact). Researchers may conduct experiments to support their research at ICS’ Xlab, which is open to outside researchers. Sincerest gratitude to Professor Toshi Akutsu for his leadership of the Xlab project.
Many of these initiatives would not be as successful without the engagement and support of our excellent alumni and corporate partners. These include SEVEN & I Holdings, INPEX, Plan-Do-See, and others who support research, teaching, and other educational enhancement activities at our school.
Let me be somewhat concrete about the financial aspect of support from alumni and corporate partners. Alumni donations have amounted to 17,496,554 yen (ICS Alumni Donation Drive) since last April and the corporate partners’ contributions of 175,000,000 yen are to support running four endowed courses. We have plans to use donations from alumni that will enrich current students’ learning environment and the functionality of the school. Some of the plans will enable the alumni members to feel direct benefits too.
Just today in our low-visibility world, we still struggle to calm the turmoil in the world’s economies, markets, geopolitics, and societies. But we can learn, we can evolve, we can act, and we can lead with positivity and an eye toward the future, whatever it may hold. This is the spirit of ICS, in which we invite all to share.
Dean Emi Osono
Hitotsubashi ICS
Hitotsubashi University Business School,
School of International Corporate Strategy
