Keio Research Institute at SFC

Objectives

When executives of non-profit and commercial organizations consider medium to long-term strategies for their organization, departments in charge of formulating strategies are instructed to do so by the executives and then collect and analyze information. For example, in the case of a marketing (demand-side data) study, executives instruct marketing department staff to conduct on-the-street surveys to identify the preferences of people on the street. At the analysis stage, activities should shed light on the causal relationship between “cause and result”. This type of research method has been used in many cases over the years. However, during the late 1990s, the IT explosion made it possible for individuals to use IT to search and collect information of their own accord and organizations involved in this have been able to easily record and accumulate myriads of customer data, such as individual purchasing data. Since 2010, with further progress in IT, huge amounts of data can be simultaneously analyzed and infrastructure is gradually being established that will enable the extraction of new knowledge and the creation of new values. This type of data, over the past few years, has been referred to as big data.
There have been many cases as of late where one statistical-analytical method considered appropriate for using this data, the correlation analysis where the relationship between two causes is investigated, has been used as a reference point in decision-making. With regards to open data, in May 2013, the second cabinet of Prime Minister Abe proclaimed its new IT strategy of “Making Japan The World’s Most Advanced IT Nation”. This means that public data held by the government can be provided to people for secondary use, with the aim being to stimulate innovation via the mutual linking with data held by private enterprise, thus generating new business and public-private collaboration. The overall aim will be for further utilization of such data to transform the market, organizational, public and government social system. This laboratory will research methods on how to integrate IT, analytics and design so as to nurture human talent able to handle such a new social system, in other words the nurturing of architects capable of handling and researching big data and data scientists that can implement information strategies within the new system.

Outline of research plan (1st year)

Research

• Research on methods to integrate IT, analytics and design
  • Research on information systems to collect various data
  • Research on architecture construction required for data processing and so forth
  • Research on data analysis methods
  • Research on human talent able to use data for strategies within an organization
• Writing up of case studies
  • Study examples within non-profit and commercial organizations and generate case studies

Nurturing of human talent

• Nurturing of data scientists
  • Proposal of training curriculum
  • Nurturing of data scientists

Researchers, managers and professors