Summit 4: Tokyo 2011, East meet west, west meets east
March 13, 2014
The 4th International Future Center Summit was held in Tokyo, Japan in November 2010. The Summit was organized by KDI (the Knowledge Dynamics Initiative of Fuji-Xerox) in collaboration with the Future Center Alliance.
The Japan Summit brought together a broad cross-section of practitioners to explore mutually interesting concepts and create a basis for learning and collaboration in the future. At the Summit, participants worked with people who are actively putting Future Center concepts into practice, as well as with people in the process of creating new concept and methodologies for Future Centers, innovation workspaces and labs for organizational and societal innovation.
The program included plenary and interactive small-group activities aimed at exploring a number of themes, with a special focus on:
What Japanese concepts such as “ba” can mean for future-directed dialogue, solving cross-organizational problems and creating effective spaces for organizational and societal innovation.
How to improve and upgrade present centers to address the challenges of the future: creating concepts and methodologies for the next generation of centers.
Visits to Japanese Future Centers and culturally important locations in the Tokyo area, as well as discussions revealing innovation and future-oriented practice at leading Japanese companies such as Sony, Hitachi and Kokuyo.
Intercultural similarities and differences in working with innovation, future centers, and collaborative work processes. What approaches are unique to different regions of the world, which approaches are universal and how can we learn from them?
Bob Stigler wrote a fascinating story about the summit

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