Innovation Practice 2020 – The Final Presentation

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The 8th or the final workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, November 25, 2020 at The Nigiwai Pavilion at Higashi-Hiroshima Campus, Hiroshima University. We had six doctorate students participating in the session to make final presentations. We had two representatives from the proposing companies, JTB Hiroshima Branch and Bakutyu,Inc. each, joining us as the audience.

Team 1 “Momiji” made the final presentation first. They showed the result of their analysis on the feedback received ate the interviews to multiple companies as well as international students. Based on the findings, they came up with a proposal of a new site called “Momiji Match,” which runs algorithm to match resource demands from companies and skillsets of students, to fill the gap in language as well as the fields of expertise of students.

Team 2 “Kizuna絆” also analyzed the interview results and highlighted the three bottlenecks that international students are facing in the job-search market. Based on the insights, they have identified the potential opportunities that Bakutyu, Inc. can enjoy through their web-based job-matching service, JIKOPY. They have proposed to introduce there the “Internship Mate” system and to add a bilingual functionality to get rid of their language barriers.

A Q&A session followed after, where the representative from JTB Hiroshima raised questions to each group. One of the questions was about the excepted cashflow or how their proposal can generate revenue as business. One of the doctorates responded to him, “If JIKOPY can provide training opportunities for students (such as language, basic soft skills, etc.) on the platform, it will add value to the site, not only to the companies but also to the students, which will eventually generate cashflow.”

The CEO of Bakutyu, Inc. gave us feedback, “We have learned a lot together with the doctorate students, especially in terms of the matching demands between the local companies and international students. We highly appreciate both teams for clearly identifying the challenges in details, while proposing new ideas we had never thought of. We all know you have spent extra hours for the past two months to discuss the topics in depth and came up with great presentations. As a result, you reminded us of our primary mission to effectively match diversified international resources to the Japanese industry (which is considered quite unique in the global context), without unexpected misinterpretation nor misunderstanding.”