Innovation Management System

Creating Reproducible Innovation: The Innovation Management System

At Innovation Laboratories, we have established and operate an Innovation Management System (IMS) aligned with the principles of ISO 56001 to enable the sustainable creation of new businesses.
In an era of increasing uncertainty, value creation does not happen by chance.
We are building an organizational framework that continuously generates innovation, with learning through customer understanding and hypothesis testing at its core.

BSI Kitemark™
Certification No. KM 842562

What is an IMS?

An Innovation Management System (IMS) is a management framework for continuously generating innovation as an organization, without relying on chance or individual talent.
At Innovation Laboratories, we position IMS not merely as a process, but as an organizational capability for continuously creating value while addressing the fundamental challenges faced by customers and society.

Why is an IMS necessary?

New business creation often begins in situations where customer needs and markets are not yet clearly defined. In such circumstances, it is more important to formulate hypotheses, test them, and continue learning than to simply proceed according to a predetermined plan. At Innovation Laboratories, we believe that continuously operating this learning cycle as an organization leads to value creation.
We experiment on a small scale, learn quickly, and apply those insights to the next challenge.
We believe that continuing to operate this learning cycle as an organization leads to sustainable value creation.

The Innovation Laboratories approach

1. Starting with the customer’s essential problems
Customer Problem Fit: CPF

We define Customer Problem Fit (CPF) as the activity of identifying the problems that customers truly want to solve and confirming that those problems are sufficiently important to them.
Rather than starting with products or technologies, we begin by exploring customers' latent challenges and gaining a deeper understanding of their business operations.
Our focus is not on deciding what to build, but on determining what problem truly needs to be solved.

2. Business development as a learning cycle

We design business development not simply as a development process, but as a learning process for deepening customer understanding.

Pre-generate – Opportunity identification
Generate – Concept creation
Ideate – Concept validation
Develop – Solution development
Launch – Solution deployment

Through this cycle, we continuously validate hypotheses and learn from the results.
The overall framework is shown below.

Innovation Laboratories has established the IMS activity phases described above and operates them as a framework for systematically generating innovation by integrating strategy, processes, people, and culture.

3. Transforming failure into value
Most Valuable Failure: MVF

In innovation, not every hypothesis proves successful.
At Innovation Laboratories, failure is not regarded as a negative outcome, but as an important learning experience that leads to future value creation.
This philosophy is embodied in our Most Valuable Failure (MVF) initiative.
MVF places emphasis not on failure itself, but on:

whether the initiative represented a meaningful challenge;
what was learned from customers and the market; and
how that learning is being applied to subsequent actions.

We accumulate the insights gained through these challenges as organizational assets and use them to support the continuous creation of innovation.

How the IMS works

Within the IMS, the key elements that support innovation are managed in an integrated manner, including:

organizational purpose, vision, and market understanding;
leadership, strategy, and portfolio management;
business development processes and support structures such as human resource development and organizational culture; and
evaluation and continual improvement

By designing and managing these elements as an integrated system,
we enable the creation of reproducible innovation across the organization.

Our vision

We view innovation not as a set of individual achievements, but as an organizational capability for continually addressing the fundamental challenges faced by customers and society.
Through IMS, we aim to continuously create value, even in an era of increasing uncertainty, by embracing challenges and learning from them.

We regard innovation not as a temporary activity, but as an important management activity that should be pursued continuously as an organization.
To this end, Innovation Laboratories has established its Innovation Policy as the foundation for all activities, setting out the values and guiding principles that support challenge and learning.

Innovation Policy

The Innovation Laboratories at NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd. is an organization whose mission is to acquire new technologies and realize new value-provider businesses.

At Innovation Laboratories, we recognize and support our commitment to earnest, iterative experimentation as a core organizational value.

In addition, in accordance with the international standard for innovation (ISO 56001:2024), we promote innovation activities with emphasis on the following:

Identifying the essential questions that need to be solved
Optimization through iterative hypothesis testing
Decision-making based on field-level facts and data
Cultivating a culture that encourages learning from failure
Building a comprehensive framework that includes human resource development and branding

Based on the above policies, while respecting the eight management principles of innovation (realization of value, future-focused leaders, strategic direction, culture, exploiting insights, management of uncertainty, adaptability, and systems approach), we will regularly review our Innovation Management System and continuously improve it.

Tomohiro Fukui
Head of the Innovation Laboratories
NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd.
Established: January 7, 2026

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