We believe that creation of new products with environmental and social values is critical in corporate research and development efforts and is also essential for our Group’s sustainable growth. To work on a promising R&D theme, we form a project team of members with a passion for success to conduct intensive research in a shorter time frame. In the previous Medium-term Business Plan period, electrochromic devices and heat dissipation materials projects were promoted to business divisions. These new technologies are soon to be realized as actual products. In the new Medium-term Business Plan period, project teams are working on R&D themes such as optical circuit materials and BMI (Brain Machine Interface) and environment-friendly technologies.
Another important task from the long-term perspective is to cultivate new business themes. We define the following three themes as strategic business fields for the new Medium-term Business Plan period: (1) ICT, (2) mobility and (3) healthcare. In addition to these, important themes include material development that contributes to addressing social issues such as energy saving and environment protection. Our mission is to work on these R&D themes to realize as many useful products as possible. To successfully achieve that, we have built and introduced an Innovation Management System (IMS) that allows us to review R&D themes that we failed to turn into a product at the first attempt and identify the failure causes. This approach provides us with clearly defined and systematic criteria for making judgments and decisions that used to depend on particular members of the workforce. We believe that this will raise the success rate of our R&D undertakings and will also contribute to speedy decision-making and robust R&D teamwork.
In addition to these efforts, we will work on enhancing our existing businesses in the One Sumibe Activities and also on improving our R&D efficiency by adopting materials informatics (MI) and open innovation approaches. Meanwhile, we will provide more opportunities for human resource exchanges and information sharing for the R&D teams so as to encourage our researchers to grow their human abilities and to stimulate the creation of new ideas through wider interactions. We believe that, for a medium-scale enterprise like us, synergy achieved through interaction between researchers and with other departments will be particularly beneficial in realizing sustainable business. By developing and working on new business themes through these initiatives, we aim at achieving a business profit of 10 billion yen by Fiscal 2030.

We deploy R&D projects based on proposals from our researchers in a bottom-up manner. I would like promising outcomes from these project works to be promoted to our business development divisions. We also form R&D projects based on proposals from laboratories for technologies and products with potential feasibility to be made into a successful business in the future, allowing effective allocation of R&D resources to create innovations.

For new product creation, we actively collaborate with universities and businesses that conduct cutting-edge research. We also focus on development of human resources capable and passionate to connect their works to environmental and social issues to make proactive proposals. As part of such human resource development, we have started exchange sessions for younger researchers in Fiscal 2023 onward, in addition to the existing laboratory directors’ meetings.

Our goal is to contribute to the realization of a recycling-oriented society by developing a variety of products and services in the three priority areas of ICT, mobility, and healthcare. This is supported by our platform technologies (“material design,” “process/composite,” and “evaluation and analysis.”), which the Company is proud of.

As part of our R&D work, we will work on planning and implementing research themes related to SDGs and carbon neutrality to address social and customer needs in the three strategic fields: ICT, mobility, and healthcare. We will work on research and development in these fields in a seamless and speedy manner to contribute to the SDGs and carbon neutrality goals. We are shifting toward a more data-driven development approach to further increase our product development capability in three basic research categories: “materials design” to discover new functionalities through molecular design and catalytic techniques, “process/composite” to discover previously unavailable plastic functionalities through organic and inorganic composition and molding techniques, and “evaluation and analysis” to understand the relationship between material structure and functionality.
During Fiscal 2023, we have successfully developed and commercialized a number of new products, including powder-form encapsulation materials for next-generation panel-level packaging, Ag-based sintering materials for heat-resistance power module TIMs, 12W heat-dissipating bonding sheets, polycycloolefin plastics for sensors, medical stents for constriction treatment, and sample preparation kits with automated pre-processing functionality for glycan analysis.

Based on the medium- to long-term perspectives, the company’s domestic R&D Organization consists of the Advanced Materials Research Laboratory that conducts research into new products and their underlying technologies and the Bioscience Research Laboratory, and the Corporate Engineering Center that works on production engineering technology development, as well as five application research laboratories that work on commercializing new products as well as improving existing products. Outside Japan, we have a corporate division research site in Akron, Ohio, USA, and a number of research sites in Europe and Asia that work on semiconductor materials and high-performance plastics.
In addition, we have developed and deployed an innovation management system that aligns with our company structure to sustain continuous innovations and enable speedy feasibility studies to create new businesses.

● Research and Development Organization

We create new products with environmental and social values. For environmental value creation, we will focus on three Rs (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) and biomass materials. For social value creation, we will work on cultivating new themes in energy creation and electricity storage fields.

Specifically, we will continue to help improve the skills of our research and development members and revitalize our laboratory structure through a number of initiatives including the ongoing new product development acceleration program (SBinno), “to encourage employees to plan and implement exciting products based on their own ideas with a view to start a new business,” technical discussion and exchange sessions where all development teams get together for debate and interaction, study meetings where participants can learn about the Group’s underlying core technologies, and technological exchange sessions with external partners (academic institutions and companies).

We actively support our application research laboratories and help them solve issues in our existing business fields. Specifically, we assist with speedy discovery of new technologies and processes on a global scale by dispatching technical expert employees to our US and European sites, acquire differentiating technologies through NanoTerasu and other advanced analysis technology development projects, and encourage collaboration between our application research laboratories and the analysis subsidiary S.B. Research Co., Ltd., a subsidiary analysis company, to accelerate resolution of issues. All these activities will contribute to achieving the new Medium-term Business Plan targets and the Fiscal 2030 sales and profitability targets.

The aim of our intellectual property (IP) management activities is to contribute to implementation of intellectual property strategies in line with our business and R&D strategies to improve our business competitive advantage. Effective use of our intellectual property (rights) to boost business competitiveness is defined as one of our Medium-term Business Plan targets. To cope with our Group’s increasingly globalized research and development scope, we closely work with the overseas subsidiaries to help them define rules and regulations regarding their intellectual property management (regulations on employee inventions and confidential information management), including what action to take when a new invention is made. The list on the right shows our six-rule basic policy business philosophy for intellectual property management. By building on the outcome of our previous work, we will continue to drive strategic intellectual property management to contribute to greater business profitability.
In the new Medium-term Business Plan period, we will focus on the following areas: (1) strategic patent applications in the three strategy fields: ICT, mobility, and healthcare, (2) strategic application of patents that address environmental issues, (3) acquiring patents to protect the Group’s business in India, and (4) IP landscaping to propose new themes to contribute to improvement of business competitiveness.
For a business to survive in a turbulent and unpredictable economic situation, it is essential to be agile in responding to changes in the environment. Our intellectual properties are closely linked to the Group’s innovative technologies and new products that serve as the source of our response capabilities. Through strategic intellectual property management activities, we will continue to accumulate and expand useful knowledge and be ready to quickly identify and deploy promising development themes.

• ❶ Strengthening our business competitiveness by drafting and executing intellectual property strategies for the major products from each of our business divisions.
• ❷ Strengthening our intellectual property strategy by drafting and executing intellectual property strategies for major themes from each research laboratory.
• ❸ Clarifying our response to intellectual property risks and reducing business risks.
• ❹ In addition to the ongoing prevention-focused legal approach to support business and research scenarios, adopt a proposal-based legal approach as well.
• ❺ Maintain and operate a corporate-wide intellectual property management system to cover the entire Sumitomo Bakelite Group (with a special focus on overseas subsidiaries).
• ❻ Practice IP landscaping to contribute to business competitiveness.

Of all the patent applications filed during Fiscal 2023, 49% were related to SDG-contributing products and technologies.