Kohei Nishiyama, inventor of Design to Order (DTO) system and founder of elephant-design and cuusoo.com. The DTO system reduces the risk of new products development by allowing manufacturers to wait until the number of orders for a product reaches the break-even point. One interesting tidbit, Nishiyama-san grew up in South America. He lived there until age 19. He’s a graduate of the University of Tokyo. So… naturally, I wondered if he had applied to UT as a foreigner. I think he should have some good advice for me in that department.
Unlike the companies that presented yesterday, Kohei Nishiyama’s company is truely “Customer Driven”. What elephant-design and cuusoo.com do is they invite users to submit their ideas (or dreams), other users who shares the same ideas can join in and provide inputs. Then, the “designers” within the cummunity can put the ideas into reality. Mr. Nishiyama summarized the business into 3 basic steps:
Continue reading ‘Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution - Panel Discussions on Technology & Design’
On Friday, Phil came over to chat with us and also to me individually. (We had kept in contact over the past 2 years even if we weren’t working together anymore.) Before I left for the day, I sent out my farewell email to the remaining few old timers that still remain, and Phil replied with something that I thought would be great reference material to put on my LinkedIn profile.
—– Forwarded Message —-
From: Phillip Eisenberg
To: Nicholas Wang
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 6:19:23 PM
Subject: RE: Farewell
Nick,
Thank you for all your contributions through the years. You certainly made me look good as we grew the data quality department and made my job easier and many others as well. I hope you got as much out of the experience of working together as I did.
Good luck with your future endeavors and don’t be shy about going after what you want. I have worked with many talented folks over the years and you are very high on that list, so never doubt your abilities.
Keep in touch and let me know if you ever need anything.
Regards,
Phil
I have to write something back as a token of appreciation. Fortunately, it will be very easy, as I had started documenting a list called “Management 101″ during my days reporting to Phil. He is like a “wise old man” that leads by example, except he’s not old. 
I filled 3 pages of the word document with things I’ve learned from him!! I’ll be using that to write him a recommendation on LinkedIn.
I guess I’ll post that document here too, so check back later for “Management 101 from Phil”!
A couple of weeks ago, my sister told me about a U.S.-Japan Innovators Project Symposium event at the Japan Society in New York. You can read about my thoughts on the event from the link above, but on this blog, I want to concentrate on “going to grad school in Japan”, and one of the most important factor is networking. The event turned out to be very enjoyable, and most importantly, I got to meet the lovely Fumiko-san at Japan Society. The next week, I sent an email to her telling her that I’m looking for info on going to grad school in Japan, and she helped me by forwarding my email to one of her contacts who went to the University of Tokyo from France. She also invited me to come back to their “2-DAY SYMPOSIUM Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution” event.
I decided to go to Friday’s Corporate Luncheon - Designing the Future: A Customer-Driven Corporate Perspective, unfortunately, it would seem that big companies such as Toyota and Panasonic are just not as “customer-driven” as I would like to see. Their speeches were all about their design ideology. I would say they are more “traditionally customer focused” than “customer driven”.
The event started with moderator Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School giving a short intro. Karim is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in the management of technological innovation and product development. He spoke of the blurring of the line between consumer and producers and gave youtube.com as an example in which a company shifted the production of “products” to the hands of the consumers. As a result, companies need to re-think how to adjust to the changing market where users are now active producers.
Continue reading ‘Designing the Future: Japan’s Tech Revolution - A Customer-Driven Corporate Perspective’
I actually only learned of the Monbusho scholarship on May 2nd, that’s the day my sister and I flew to Taiwan to visit our grandpa. We came back to the States on May 8th, and the application deadline for “Research Student” was May 18th. (Note that I linked to the Japan Information Center at the Consulate General of Japan in Chicago rather than New York. This is because I found that the Chicago site provides more info than the New York site. You may also want to look at other Japan Consulate location to get more information.)
I did a little digging on the web, read through the application guidelines. The “must be less than 35 years old” requirement hit me hard and made me seriously think about my career and my future. I decided to go for it!
I only had a little more than 2 weeks to prepare and 10 days to get my documents together. Real briefly, the documents that are required are:
Continue reading ‘The Preparation and Result of my Monbukagakusho Application’
Besides writing about my failures and personal experiences, I will also document the process of admission here. The first step is to gather information and to inquire about department specific admission procedures. Here, I’m writing to University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. I will post more information about this graduate school in a later post. When I receive more info from the staff over there, I’ll also post them here, so look forward to it.
Academic Affairs Division (学務係 Gakumu Kakari)
gakumu@iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Tel: 03-5841-8769
Fax: 03-3811-5970
—– Forwarded Message —-
From: Nicholas Wang
To: gakumu@iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 7:08:51 AM
Subject: 外国人研究生 Foreign Trainee
To the Academic Affairs Division,
初めまして、ニコラス ウォンと申します。 ワシントン大学の卒業生で、Microsoft MSN.comとYahoo.comなどのネット会社で八年間働く経験をもっています。今は修士課程を探しています、来年の四月入学希望です。
Continue reading ‘Inquiries about Admission at University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies’
I’ve only just learned of this awesome Japanese government scholarship from my sister recently, after I told her that I’m being laid off.
My sister was lucky enough to have done 2 exchange programs to Japan, once when she was in high school, she spent a summer in Kagoshima, Kyuushu. The second was in her last year in college, she went for a whole year at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. It was at Aoyama where she met people who was on the Monbukagakusho (Monbusho for short) scholarship.
I’m a typical elder child in the house. I studied boring subjects in college, got myself stable jobs at Microsoft and Yahoo! Never strayed far from the planned path. When my sister got to do the summer home stay in Kagoshima, I was quite jealous of her. I never chose to have any fun in school, all I thought about was picking the “right” courses to prepare myself for a career in the computer industry. I really wished I had taken chances to relax and do something crazy.
Now, I’ve just passed the big 30 mark. (and by just, I mean more than a year ago :P) I finally have enough skills and experience under my belt to make me feel safe. I begin to think about stepping out of the “stable zone”… doing the “crazy” stuff. I’ve had some crazy ideas, one was to make films about sharks. I love sharks! And I fucking hate Chinese people for eating shark fins! I wanted to put some bogus research on film saying that shark fins are cancerous! So they would stop eating shark fins! Yes, the idea is bat shit crazy!:D Continue reading ‘Monbukagakusho - the reason why I decided to go to Grad school in Japan’
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