Let's Talk about .. TJIA 2012

This year I am co-chairperson of the 5th Thailand-Japan International Academic Conference 2012 (TJIA 2012). TJIA 2012 is going to be on October 20th, 2012 at W9 Building, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ookayama Campus, Tokyo, Japan.

It is going to be one of the interesting place to communicate and exchange the ideas among researchers, students, and academicians from Thailand, Japan, and others.

What is TJIA?
The Thailand-Japan International Academic Conference (TJIA) is the annual conference that provides a platform for students, academicians and researchers to present their research results and development activities. This conference not only provides opportunities for the delegates to exchange new ideas and application experiences face to face, but also promotes research collaboration between Thailand and Japan. The TJIA is organized by Thai Students’ Association in Japan under the Royal Patronage (TSAJ) with the goal to promote the collaboration among Thai, Japanese as well as people from other countries regardless of their specialization and nationality. The TJIA conference has evolved from the Thai-Japanese Students’ Academic Exchange Meeting (TJSE) conference held in 2006 and 2007 at Osaka University. Following the success of TJSE, the conference continued being held every year and its scale was extended to be equivalent to international symposium under the name “Thailand-Japan International Academic Conference (TJIA)” starts from 2008, when it was held at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Source: http://tsaj.org/tjia2012/about-tjia/

Let's Talk about .. iRobot

I got the information about iRobot from STeLA, so I went to listen to Colin Angle, Co-founder, chairman & CEO of iRobot in iRobot CEO Lecture at the New Otani Hotel, Tokyo on September 28, 2011.

He talked about his adventure in entrepreneurship after his graduation from MIT.

Nowadays, iRobot has 400 million in 2010 revenue, more than 700 employees located in Hong Kong, China, France, UK, India, and 3 offices in USA. They have shipped more than 1.5 billion dollars worth of robots.

He separated the timeline of his company into 3 phases: Technology development, Robot development, and Robot production. 

He has inspiration to make cool technology. During the technology development, iRobot built cool robots. In the robot development, iRobot built many types of robot including Dinosaurs robot.

He also had many failed business models over time. But he and his company is still keep continuing until they built Roomba-an intelligent FloorVac.

First, because they did not know about how to clean. What they know was only cleaning home was a great application. So, they made a asymmetric strategic partnership to learn how to clean and manufacture using OPM. The concept is that the large company has money, channel, and market knowledge, while small company, like iRobot at that time, has cool technology, and innovation. In fact, the name they gave to Roomba at the first time was "CyberSuck", and then, "DustPuppy", but they are not good to be a commercial product, thus they outsourced the company to create the name, which is "Roomba". One luck they got is the advertisement. Because of the cool innovation, the iRobot were published in many famous media such as Popular Science, National Geographic, etc.

Colin showed the Revised Technology Adoption Life Cycle. The innovators and early adaptor periods are not too hard since the innovation lovers will buy your new cool technological products, but to become the mass product, many factors are needed.

Engineering VS Marketing

Colin described about the vision of engineers and marketers. They are different.

There are 3 rules to make the product:

1. Don't get struck on Oriental carpet fringe.

2. Simple is good.

3. Reliable and Dependable is everything.

iRobot Ava

The new idea, iRobot is doing is the Robot Enabled Home. To be the center of the elements of a home that takes care of everyone, they built the prototype of iRobot Ava. Ava is a Human Interface Robot (HIR). The controller interface is Apple iPad.

Let's Talk about .. Drug Development and Innovations

On August 1st, 2012, I joined the open seminar organized by Global Health Leadership Program (GHLP), the University of Tokyo. 

The speaker is Dr. Ryo Kubota, M.D., Ph.D., Chairman, President & CEO of Acucela, Inc. The title of seminar is Drug development and innovations driven by bio ventures in the United States.

He described about how to introduce new molecule to the market and innovate as new drug.

FDA or U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the institute that has knowledge of all drugs from overall companies even confidential information, so it is good that all the drug companies let FDA checks the new products or experimental results before coming our to the market.

Process from discover to commercialization

When is the best time to start the drug company? Development phase should be the best time since we have done some amount of experiment until the risk already reduced. However, for him, he started since the beginning period.

There is difference between in Japan and US since Japanese people require quite high level of safety.

The cost of new drugs

The cost of new drugs increase every year. Currently, 2.7 Billion US Dollar is the fundamental cost to create one new drug development. It is capital intensive industry.

Current US health care costs exceed 17% GDP, while Japan is 8.5% GDP (That’s why we cannot see many new drugs come in Japanese market). However, the life expectation is better, so it means other factors that result this outcome in Japan is better than US.

Deep pile

The idea of deep pile shows that in case the drug company failed from one molecule, the company still can operate with other parallel molecule research.

Acucela

"The more diversity you are, the more idea you have", Dr. Kobuta explained that he tries to have multi nationality employees in his company because he believes that when we have any problems, people from difference places have different idea to solve the problem.

Drug development and innovations driven by bio ventures in the United States