THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Hitachi turns focus to social innovation

Hitachi turns focus to social innovation

Firm working on acceleration via digital tech, collaborative creation; also plans launch of humanoid robot as it remains committed to Thai investment

Japanese conglomerate Hitachi is focused on business transformation via social innovation, enabling acceleration through digital technology and collaborative creation. 
The company has also announced an interconnected autonomous humanoid robot, named EMIEW, which will be available in the Japanese market in 2018.

Hitachi turns focus to social innovation

Toshiaki Higashihara, the president and chief executive officer of Hitachi
Toshiaki Higashihara, president and chief executive officer, said the company was now focusing on social innovation business with the arrival of innovative services based on digital technologies, and dramatic changes in both lifestyles and business.
“This includes the rules and the players involved in order to support the arrival of the era of uncertainty that comes with increasingly diverse human values, increasingly complex social environments, innovation in services, rapid changes and an increase in black-swan [major surprise] phenomena, which are impossible to predict and have a huge impact,” he said.
Under its “Social Innovation Business” project, the technology giant is focused on four main areas: power and energy; industry, distribution and water; urban development; and finance, public and Healthcare.
As an example of social innovation business, Higashihara cited “smart” manufacturing that connects systems for design and manufacturing, quality management, production management, procurement, accounting, human resources and energy management.
Another example is urban development, in which the company is working with the private sector and universities to develop the Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City as a comprehensive special zone for vitalising the area and turning it into a future environmental city, which is a new vision for the cities of tomorrow, he explained.
He added that through social-infrastructure business, Hitachi was combining the many elements that it had cultivated up to now: operational technologies in frontlines system; information technologies that analyse conditions and support management; and a wide range of products and systems. 
This combination of elements has been embodied in the social innovation business projects that anticipated the wave of digitalisation. 
“Along with the evolution of digital technologies, we are seeing a variety of paradigm shifts characterised by massive changes, from products to customers, from owning to sharing, from closed to open, and from individual optimisation to overall optimisation,” the company’s president said.
Moreover, in the midst of major changes in industry and society as a whole, Hitachi is accelerating collaborative creation with customers as an innovation partner in the era of the Internet of Things IoT), big data, artificial intelligence and analytics.
For the IoT, the company is also focused on the IoT platform Lumada, which fosters collaborative creation for accelerating social innovation in five categories: IoT platform, energy, industry, urban development, and life and economy.
He described Lumada as an IoT platform that supports all aspects of collaborative creation with customers, from the sharing of issues and the analysis and visualisation of those issues, to the design, testing and simulation of business models – and ultimately the provision of solutions and services.
The Lumada open platform will be able to use the digital solutions and grow into an ecosystem that supports “Society 5.0”, he said.
Moreover, Hitachi has also introduced an interconnected autonomous humanoid robot named EMIEW, which realises support and data utilisation services in a variety of fields, including customer services, guidance and monitoring. 
It moves at 6 kilometres per hour, has dynamic action based on image and multilingual recognition and cooperative interconnection of multiple sites, as well as remote monitoring, he said. 
EMIEW acts as an IoT sensor for computers, communicating frontline data to robot IT platforms in the cloud, and providing feedback on optimum solutions to the front lines in real time.
The company is currently testing EMIEW at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport for giving directions, and has conducted similar testing at the main Tokyo rail station. 
It expects to test 100 units in the next step, with a view to making the robot available in the Japanese market in 2018, Higashihara said.

Committed to Thailand
He also said Hitachi remained committed to continued investment in Thailand, which would be an Asean production and manufacturing centre, as well as an economic hub, in the 10-member grouping. 
The company is also maintaining its business focus on railways and elevators, components and automotive parts, energy and the healthcare sector in the Kingdom, he stressed.

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