With the shift to a decarbonized society, efforts to stabilize energy supplies, growing geopolitical risk, and major advances in leading-edge technologies such as AI, the world is changing faster now than ever before. At the same time, underlying structural problems such as intensifying natural disasters stemming from global warming, insufficient labor pools in Japan due to shrinking of the domestic population, and aging of infrastructure seem to be getting worse. Major changes can also be seen in people’s daily lives and working environments due to the spread of ICT and the resulting increase in the visibility of society, and due to efforts aimed at achieving carbon neutrality. In response to these varied and complex challenges, companies are increasingly called upon to provide innovative solutions that transcend the bounds of traditional business frameworks.

The Meiden Group is responding by integrating energy and information systems to create products and services that can provide technology-based solutions to help solve issues of public concern and improve the safety and security of daily life across the board.

Amid such endeavors, the R&D Division’s role is to anticipate the coming years and continually generate the core technologies and products that will become future mainstays of Meidensha. These activities are designed to create the pipeline of new products and services that will enable the Company to provide new value. As we strive to anticipate and create the technologies required to realize our envisioned version of society, making ongoing QCD (quality, cost and delivery) improvements to existing business fields is an important requirement for enhancing product competitiveness. At the same time, new products and business fields also need to be created to ensure the Group’s growth. Fostering innovation and foresight capabilities amid changing Group operating environments, striving for R&D that regularly and continually generates new value, active bolstering of existing strengths in pursuit of corporate growth, and constantly challenging ourselves to create new value are at the core of our basic policies. In addition, we have established direct current (DC) and high-frequency technologies, “power chemitronics” technologies (combining power electronics with electrochemistry), and digital twin O&M (operations and maintenance) technologies as our three main-focus fields as we lay out our ideal vision for the future and acquire and develop new core technologies while pursuing co-creation of value through a scenario-oriented research approach. The following is an introduction to the R&D Division’s activities and how our endeavors tie in with Meidensha's business.

The R&D Division is dedicated to fostering the innovation and foresight capabilities needed to adapt to today’s changing business environment (global environmental crises and other issues of public concern). We aim to produce R&D results that enable the Company to generate new value on an ongoing basis in terms of new business fields and improved profitability.
To these ends, we aim for R&D that meets and even exceeds both in-house and outside expectations based on the following central approaches.

1. Value Updates: Bolstering Unique Products and Existing Strengths

By further improving upon unique products offered by Meidensha while pursuing development operations within business units whose results meet and even exceed customer expectations, we will boost competitive strength in existing businesses fields.

2. New Business Creation: Building the Future of Meidensha

We are striving to speed up our hypothesis–verification–improvement cycles while providing ongoing training designed to produce an innovative workforce. We are also cultivating R&D environments that maximize the potential of innovative human resources.

3. Development Quality and Speed Improvements

We actively pursue open innovation to realize high-speed, high-quality technology and product development in response to the rapid changes occurring throughout our world today.