Hitachi Opens New California Research Facility for Collaborative Creation in Social Innovation 

Hitachi Opens New California Research Facility for Collaborative Creation in Social Innovation

Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501) and Hitachi America, Ltd. today announced the opening of a new dedicated research facility, the Global Center for Social Innovation – North America (CSI-North America), for collaborative creation with strategic partners in industry and academia. The new facility, located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, will serve as a dedicated research and collaboration center, and represents the first regional Hitachi R&D center outside of Japan to offer Hitachi’s collaborative creation process to business partners.

Today, the many challenges facing industry have become the same challenges facing society itself. Not only has the way to create value changed, but the global business environment has become more complex, fast-changing and inter-connected. The Hitachi Group has announced its commitment to its Social Innovation Business which provides solutions to these new complex and changing challenges facing society, drawing on its vast portfolio of technology and knowledge in both information technology and infrastructure, a distinguishing feature of the Hitachi Group.

To lead this global initiative, the Research and Development Group of Hitachi, Ltd. realigned the global research organization in April 2015 under three centers: the Global Center for Social Innovation (“CSI”), the Center for Technology Innovation, and the Center for Exploratory Research to promote global research activities under customer-driven, technology-driven and vision-driven innovation models throughout the world. A key feature of the co-innovation process in the Global Center for Social Innovation (“CSI”) is the presence of cross-disciplinary researchers, designers and solution architects, who will work directly with customers under a shared vision to generate new concepts, and create prototypes and demos that are ultimately verified through a unified proof-of-concept process.

Hitachi America’s R&D Division was established in 1989 with the original purpose of being close to advanced markets in order to better understand trends and work with leading partners. This closer proximity enabled Hitachi to further develop such business areas as automotive systems, storage virtualization, broadband communications, harmonious computing and other cutting-edge technologies that serve customers.

CSI – North America, the regional center for the Americas, carries on this tradition leading the Hitachi research organization in applying a “market-in” approach to develop innovative solutions with strategic partners, focusing on market opportunities in areas such as energy & natural resources, transportation, telecommunications, healthcare. Current projects have already started yielding results, such as the network-analytics solution proposed by CSI-North America, which leverages streaming data processing technology developed in the Center for Technology Innovation in Japan. Using the common analytics framework being developed by Hitachi’s Big Data Laboratory to accelerate the development of new solutions, researchers specializing in big data analytics, information and communication systems, and user experience design at the new Silicon Valley facility will work with customers using the dedicated space, original tools and methodology developed by CSI-North America as well as NEXPERIENCE,*1 a collection of methodologies and tools developed by CSI-Tokyo, to facilitate the co-innovation process.

“To achieve both real economic value and value to society, technology innovation has moved into an era which goes beyond the confines of one company or even one industry sector.” said Dr. Keiji Kojima, Vice President and Executive Officer of Hitachi, Ltd., CTO, and President & CEO of the Research and Development Group. “In order to deliver real-world solutions in a timely manner, it is imperative that the Hitachi Group works closely with partners through open innovation and customer engagement to identify the real needs and challenges that need to be overcome to deliver real innovation.”

“Hitachi America’s R&D has contributed strongly to Hitachi’s overall U.S. business over the years, including areas such as eco-friendly automotive technologies as well as advanced IT platforms with Big Data analytics, among others.” said Dr. George Saikalis, Senior Vice President of Hitachi America, Ltd., General Manager of Hitachi America, Ltd. – R&D Division, GM of CSI-North America, “With the opening of CSI-North America, we will now accelerate the development of scalable solutions through what we call ITxOT — a fusion of information technology with operation technology, enabled by Hitachi’s leading Big-Data analytics capabilities leveraging our IT platforms and domain knowledge. Some of our current projects have already started yielding results, such as our network analytics solution.”

“CSI-North America will leverage the diverse technology portfolio and expertise of Hitachi’s Global Research organization in order to develop real-world solutions that will drive Social Innovation in the Americas together with our partners,” said Dr. Kojima.