With the aid of sturdy and sophisticated engineering designs, Japanese firms aspire to revitalize their innovation engines and reunite with their customers. Japan has assumed a leadership role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution since it is the driving force reshaping not just society but also economies and industries. New technologies like artificial intelligence, medical technologies, automated cars, and many more are taken into account for their immense potential to elevate humans to new levels of well-being in order to assure a human-centred vision for innovation. 

Connecting with consumers is essential for innovation. Let us look at how engineering design has functioned as a bridge to connect Tokyo to the global IT industry.

The role of design in fostering Japanese innovation

Everybody can tell whether a design is good when they see it, but what do we mean by design, though? It is now a commercial field that uses well-established scientific methodologies to translate consumer wants into new goods and services rather than only being about aesthetics. The effective design has a rich history in Japan.

But what connection exists between design and business performance?

In terms of sales growth and shareholder returns, companies with the best engineering designs outperformed the industry benchmark. These connections hold across several industries, particularly in these four core themes: promoting analytical leadership and smart execution, providing an effortless client experience, adapting to interdisciplinary skills, and stressing continuous iteration.

Software engineers are an integral part of the product development process, and since Japan has a competitive edge in IT due to its sophisticated network infrastructures that integrate physical items with IT, they act as a powerful tailwind for innovation in the Internet of Things (IoT) as well.

Analytical leadership and smart execution

Japanese IT companies generally prioritize consensus before making changes, and CEOs also take the group's opinions into account when making choices. This has been shown to be a remarkably successful method of guaranteeing the excellent quality of Japanese items since it identifies all the minute aspects that may go wrong. The disadvantage of consensus decision-making is that it frequently actually carries out high-risk, high-reward ideas before they reach the leadership. Engineers and designers are less inclined to promote fresh concepts when they are aware of this.

C-level executives in Japan are beginning to see how consensus decision-making may impede innovation. Bold CEOs that focus on their customers' requirements urge their employees to go beyond their comfort zones in order to provide more than incremental innovation. A prime example of such a leader is the CEO of a Japanese IT company, who is of the opinion that customers, not engineers, should choose how things should be done. The CEO gave a solid order to include product designers, engineers, and marketers in the process of understanding those requirements. The company built its product specifications on user needs rather than the engineering-led consensus-building method.

They believe that design uses client insights to overcome high-spec engineering and obtain the proper specification. Along with giving the order, this leader made three crucial decisions: committing adequate funds to innovation initiatives; controlling hazards with small-scale pilot programs; and utilizing market data to establish performance KPIs.

Therefore, executives are evaluating SKU performance more critically and mandating the retirement of underperforming ones by fusing sales data with consumer information. Business unit executives anticipate a reversal of profit-and-loss predictions to support expenditures on new product development.

They want a quantifiable response to evaluate how difficult it will be to produce a product and utilize statistics to influence their decisions. The business makes these estimations using information from previous projects, including development time, CAD version history, and the degree of team communication.

An Effortless User Experience

Japanese businesses make a lot of effort to understand their consumers, yet many find it difficult to determine what their customers' true needs are. To get consumer insights, these businesses frequently rely on their sales staff and surveys. This market information may not be indicative of the demands of typical consumers since it is frequently biased toward the needs of the most ardent clients or the most significant accounts. As a result, there is a propensity to find solutions in every circumstance and resistance to getting rid of low-value features that increase expenses unnecessarily or, in certain situations, even worsen the customer experience.

Product development engineers are dispatched to the field to monitor care delivery in real-world scenarios. They are establishing profound awareness for patients and healthcare professionals while also learning about the industry and identifying pain spots and improvement potential. In this way, engineers improve their understanding of client demands, not simply product technical requirements.

Other businesses are altering their product features, which now include specific links to particular consumer requirements. A project to enter a new product category at the equipment manufacturer used a demonstrable design-thinking approach: every aspect of the product was directly related to an identified consumer requirement.

It made it possible for technical teams and their managers to always remember the customer's voice. CEOs have noted that this strategy is effective because it "breaks big challenges down into manageable chunks."

Interdisciplinary skills

People with specific technical talents are frequently hailed in Japan as Takumi or craftsmen, yet this mentality unwittingly encourages the development of functional silos. Fresh thinking and a variety of perspectives from various roles are essential to successful design. In Japan, where technology is dominated by big businesses with devoted personnel and stiff organizational borders that prevent information sharing between functions, it is more difficult to have an open exchange of ideas.

The best engineering design-led businesses put a lot of effort into making sure that every department inside the company, not just one, is accountable for customer-centric design. The best way to do it is to provide small, well-supported cross-functional teams with the freedom to work swiftly and independently. Success stories that come out of these teams go out and motivate efforts for additional items. Japanese IT service companies have improved as product designers in many ways, one of which is the shift to a cross-functional, collaborative working environment. Cross-functional teams enable simultaneous information sharing and conversation, fostering understanding and encouraging more creative debates.

Continuous Iteration

The third essential component of excellent design practice is interconnected with the first two. Design leaders approach product development in a highly iterative manner. Throughout the design cycle, cross-functional teams produce several prototypes while constantly adding and improving features. Importantly, they test these versions wherever feasible with actual consumers in real-world situations and utilize the input to improve subsequent versions.

This strategy is based on agile approaches, which in recent years have revolutionized the efficiency, effectiveness, and speed of software development. It contrasts sharply with the typical waterfall process used in Japanese engineering, where new products aren't seen by consumers until the job is virtually finished and product development occurs sequentially through many barriers and hand-offs between functions.

Increasing the rate of improvement

It might be difficult to integrate quick, somewhat unpredictable agile processes with the lengthy planning frameworks used by Japanese businesses. However, the new strategy has significant predecessors in Japanese business. The lean manufacturing approaches that have revolutionized manufacturing productivity, initially in Japan and then in the rest of the globe, are fundamentally based on kaizen—the idea of constant incremental improvement of operations. Several Japanese businesses are currently using the kaizen method to produce new products.

Japanese businesses are increasingly incorporating other tools from the agile toolkit. For instance, engineers at design-focused equipment companies utilize sophisticated project-tracking software to handle a backlog of bugs and feature requests while developing new products. Every day, the engineering and marketing teams convene for a stand-up meeting to discuss task progress. Three-week sprints of development work are completed, and then there is a week of testing, reviewing, and planning for the following sprint.

How can BJIT connect you to the global IT industry?

A leading Japanese IT company, BJIT, with a joint venture in Bangladesh, addresses each of these four issues and makes use of them to strengthen its capacity for innovation. BJIT will look at a significant issue facing many industrial actors in the nation: how to provide an existing workforce with the knowledge, skills, and mindset required to produce an excellent product that will attract the world's top entrepreneurs, businesses, experiments, and data to build the Fourth Industrial Revolution.