Abstract
Olympus Corporation recently founded a new research laboratory the Future Creation Laboratory, based on its management principles "social involvement, social insight, and social inspiration." This laboratory is committed to pursuing a variety of research projects by identifying and creating social values for enriching people's lives in the future. Instead of simply predicting the technological future needs, our actions start with imagining what people really want in the future, and creating and sharing visions with strategic partners of both academia and industries worldwide. To accomplish such actions, the laboratory organizes a flexible management style that enhances originality of ideas by individual researchers, and that also leads to a new collaborative framework and an open innovation process. In this paper, I present the concepts and the practices of this innovative management as well as research activities in the Future Creation Laboratory.
