Morinosuke Kawaguchi Keynote Speaker

Morinosuke Kawaguchi is an innovation and competitive strategy consultant, futurist, and award-winning author.

Kawaguchi is the founder and CEO of Morinoske Co. Ltd., a creative future laboratory based in Tokyo. As Japan’s foremost futurist, he serves as a strategy advisor to the Japanese government and to some of the world’s largest multinationals.

His future forecasting book, Megatrends, was first published in 2013 by Nikkei BP and its strategies have been adopted by many organisations. The book contains three volumes with a special volume dedicated to the future of the car industry, and another to the future of ICT. Megatrends’ latest update in 2018, includes a new chapter on ‘Happiness’ and is the most expensive book by a single author on the Japanese market.

Since 2014, Morinosuke has been an advisor to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s National Strategy Headquarters. He was first invited for his ideas on creating jobs and gaining foreign currency, issues crucial for Japan’s 2030 future strategy. He was also involved in the government’s science and technology policy-planning process. On top of being an advisor to the Future Laboratory of Nikkei BP.

Previously for eleven years, Morinosuke was the Principal & Associate Director of Arthur D. Little, (Japan) Inc. Prior to that, he worked at the Kansai Research Institute, Inc., where Kawaguchi focused on evaluating the marketability of manufacturing technologies, building technology strategy, and setting intellectual property strategy. There, he invented the Morinoske Subculture-driven Innovation Model, where subculture was established as the viable solution for innovative industrial and national strategies.

Kawaguchi was also an engineer at Hitachi Ltd., where he wrote over 35 patents and was awarded one Gold and two Bronze Awards as the principal writer of the “bacteria-free washing machine” in 1994. Through his many achievements, Morinosuke Kawaguchi is recognised as an expert in the management of technology, intellectual property and design.

Morinosuke Kawaguchi is an award-winning author whose books influence thinking and practice. His seminal book, Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturist’s Guide to Technology & Design was awarded the prestigious Nikkei BP BizTech Book Award in 2008. In Taiwan, the book was listed as number one among the top ten “Great Technology Management Books 2010”. That same year Taiwan’s Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs and South Korea’s Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH) studied the book to be applied in their countries’ technology and innovation strategies.

Kawaguchi writes regularly for various business publications and magazines. His popular columns had up to 100,000 views a day. For years, he was a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Doshisha Business School’s Global MBA course in Kyoto and is a sought-after bilingual lecturer. He has hosted a variety of TV programmes and is a popular commentator for television and print media.

Morinosuke Kawaguchi graduated with a Master of Science in Chemistry from the University of Illinois. Born in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, he currently resides in Tokyo with his wife and two shiba inu dogs.