Mining A Diamond in the Rough
Final Report on the Young Professionals Study Group on Business Process Innovations with Nomura Securities
Mar. 30, 2018
“The Young Professionals Study Group on Business Process Innovations” launched at the beginning of 2017 by NRI and Nomura Securities held its third and final term of this fiscal year with the theme of AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality).
This was the last meeting for the group, and a comprehensive review of the year’s activities was conducted.
Theme of the Third Term: AR and VR
Working under the concept of “get hands-on experience first, think about applications later”, the Junior Employees Study Group was carried out by junior employees chosen from the two companies to learn new technologies together, come up with ideas to apply those technologies and engage in experiments for about three months per theme.
For the theme of blockchain in the first term, the group came up with specific business ideas for obtaining patents. For the theme of AI and robots in the second term, the group proposed ideas for overhauling the way people work in Japan.
In the third term, given the difficulty of linking the theme of AR and VR to finance, group members looked beyond their work and came up with ideas mainly related to everyday problems that they wanted to solve. Working together, the rookie employees discussed what can be achieved with new technologies and how the use of those technologies may change our future.
In the third term, we had the pleasure of having Microsoft Japan join the group for the second time in a row, and received cooperation from Arumon, NRI’s internal group of junior employees seeking to create new businesses and services. This enabled us to gain new knowledge and experience as well as strengthen our human networks.
Looking Back at This Year’s Activities
Ken Ebato, NRI Senior Managing Director
Through the Young Professionals Study Group on Business Process Innovations, organized with Nomura Securities, group members were able to achieve the following:
- Gain hands-on experience of new technology and work on innovative efforts
- Work with customers to gain their perspective
- Communicate with customers and external parties (vendors) to gain knowledge and experience not available internally
- Build a network of customers, external parties (vendors), and internal colleagues
The knowledge and experience gained through these activities will be extremely useful in considering business going forward. I also believe that, by continuing this type of activity, we will be able to create new businesses, overhaul operations, and provide new services.
We are committed to creating further opportunities for young employees to work on innovations.
