Research and development at Mitsubishi Materials is conducted by the Innovation Center (mainly the four bases: Naka, Omiya, Kitamoto, and Onahama) and the Incubation Center, which are execution units under the Monozukuri and R&D Strategy Division of the Strategic Headquarters.
In 2019, so that we could more quickly respond to social changes, we reformed into a flexible organizational structure to realize the fusion of knowledge from multiple specialized fields. With a free environment to encourage the emergence of ideas, we have accelerated the creation of new products and technologies.
At the Innovation Center, we are working on creating an organization environment fit for the next 100 years. As a part of that, we have migrated from a vertically divided organization into a flexible organizational structure that spans multiple specialty fields.
Additionally, we are now a flat organization, so all researchers work directly under the center manager. This makes it easier to gather all the people a project leader has requested, and it has also created an environment where instead of waiting for commands from above, researchers are self-motivated to get involved in the research.
Moreover, thanks to the implementation of online communication tools, everyone is more active in transmitting and sharing of information and everyone’s knowledge is merging. All of this has made it easier to develop research themes with novel and new approaches and we are seeing results.

As a way for the researchers to use their curiosity and develop new themes, we are introducing various systems, such as our “10% Culture,” and building an innovative culture. In 2019, to help researchers envision new research topics without feeling trapped by the already existing frameworks of business and technology, we initiated the Future Business and Technology Creation Area. Our researchers freely create new ideas that will become the seeds of our future business and are taking on the challenge of new projects.

There were many subjects that I wanted to get involved with one day, so with no hesitation I decided to take part in the Future Business and Technology Creation Area. The topic was biology related, something that we had not dealt with at our company, and is the world’s first development of a process in which microorganisms are used to collect precious metals.
I worked with this project for two years. I spent half a year gathering information and drafting up plans. After that, I took another half a year to reach out to about 100 research centers to look for partners and to start the project. The remaining year was spent performing basic experiments. We were selected as a New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) project and received funding, so we continue to investigate the commercialization of this process.

As part of the plan to improve our organizational culture, we are reforming the work environment for our researchers. We have employed a well thought out room layout which incorporates the themes of “individual deepening,” the creation of an environment that meets each individual’s needs and helps them to work efficiently, and “co-creation,” the creation  of an environment which encourages the interactions between researchers from different fields to help create new ideas.

We have four main bases for Innovation Center: Naka, Omiya, Kitamoto, and Onahama. Naka was the first to reform their room layout. We didn’t just make the interior look nicer. With organization reform in mind, we conducted a questionnaire with all the researchers at various facilities and got a range of feedback. Since the reform decision was made after everyone had evaluated multiple proposals, I think the changes will result in high satisfaction. By making the office space into a free-address office, researchers can more actively communicate with researchers they normally wouldn’t interact with. The concepts of “individual deepening” and “co-creation” are slowly becoming a reality.

To enable rapid development to meet the diversifying needs of various materials, we are now making data-driven efforts with machine learning and AI based on data science, also known as Materials Informatics (MI), rather than the conventional methods that relied on the process of trial and error. In June 2020, in order to increase our MI expertise for speedy development and discovery of new materials, Mitsubishi Materials (MMC) and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) established the MMC-NIMS Center of Excellence for Materials Informatics Research.