I’m a zero-generation student, since I attended the GEIOT program in the inaugural year when I was in the second year of the master’s program in the then Graduate School of Information Science of NAIST. When I was an undergraduate at Ritsumeikan University’s College of Science and Engineering, I took an entrepreneurship education course in the College of Business Administration. However, there were few lectures on commercializing new science and technology. I enrolled at NAIST and joined GEIOT because I thought I could continue my research and learn how to commercialize and implement the seeds of my research in society.

After learning with the GEIOT program, I established amirobo tech Inc. during my doctoral course. While studying as a student, I was conducting research to examine the effectiveness of humanoid conversational robots installed to monitor elderly adults, but the cost of robots posed a barrier from the perspective of a practical solution. I then decided to conduct research using a smartphone application in which a character would interact with the user, which I was developing concurrently. However, this experiment had issues where the subject attributes were biased, and the number of participants was limited. Therefore, I decided to release the application to the public to collect dialogic data and to determine whether it was actually able to perform the monitoring. At that stage, I established a company to release the application, but one issue to address for the business going forward was the need of modification because there was a gap between the uses expected in the research phase and those who would actually pay to use the application. Another issue was the legal knowledge that ensures that the copyright royalties were reflected in the costs. Neither of those issues could be specified through technology research alone.

Yes, I do. It is difficult to operate the research laboratory by myself, but I have a team of faculty members and students who share the load for its operation and management, which allows me to have a side job. Since NAIST is a graduate school, our research environment is set up, and we can receive comments from a business perspective through interactions with companies in the neighboring Keihanna area. We have a diverse student body that consists of graduates from other universities and technical colleges and international students, and the strengths of each student’s technical research sometimes provide hints to practical application. I also think that it is good that as a university the barriers to starting up are not high.

A startup is a small business that you start with very little funding, but as a researcher, it is rewarding to develop business with the important goal of solving social issues and growing on a global scale. However, even if a research paper is academically recognized, predictions and advice from management consultants may be required as to the extent of economic impact of that technology on general users. In addition, the start and end of the fiscal year are determined on the basis of the timing of starting up a business. I started my business in the winter, so amirobo tech’s fiscal year-end overlaps with the timing of the master’s thesis review, which makes time management and work difficult. That was a miscalculation.