Our service

Management consulting

Management consulting is our standard service, although ours is distinguished by being specialized in R&D and business creation.
We visit your office or the place specified on a regular basis, participate in management meetings, and provide advice, proposal, and suggestion.
The topics include improvement of cost efficiency of R&D and business development, business planning, and collaboration arrangement.

Project management

We provide our clients with comprehensive support to make their projects of R&D and business development successful.
Our consulting starts in the planning stage, and continues through the middle stage to monitor and control, and finalizes in the last stage to evaluate the performance.
As the project often needs reshaping depending on the environmental factors, we instruct the project team to conduct the so-called PDCA cycle, i.e., plan, do, check, and act.

In / Out-licensing

It is sometimes a better decision to take advantege of external network to develop a business rather than to totally depend on the in-house resources.
To lincense in necessary technology or business modules from the outside is effective for saving time and money if the client does not have sufficient resources inside, while to license out the internally developed technology or intellectual property is practical for recovering the investment if the item is difficult to proceed in the ordinary business pipeline in the company.
We advise our client to consider in-licensing or out-licensing option and provide a list of carefully chosen candidates for negotiation. From the outset of the negotiation to the end of closing agreements, we sincerely support the client to complete the licensing.

Business restructuring, M&A

The current harsh business enviroment quite often forces the company to introduce restructuring, merger and acquisition, divestment, and other drastic corporate management. The problem is to conduct adequate evaluation of its technological competitiveness, intellectual property, and human resources of technical departments.
Without deep understanding both of the technology and business, accurate evaluation cannot be achieved, and this is why our consulting is valuable for the client considering restructuring or M&A. In collaboration with the professional staff such as lawyers and accountants, we provide our expertise for evalution of the technology and intellectual property.

Contract research, Marketing research

Before deciding investment of a certain amount of money to a challenging R&D or business project it is absolutely necessary to understand how large risk will be hidden in which stage.
It is however not easy to conduct such preliminary analysis of feasibility because evaluation of development of technology to business is hardly achievable without broad and comprehensive research from an independent viewpoint. We propose contract research of feasibility of R&D and business project, as well as marketing research before installment of new products or services.

Human resource development

To keep competitiveness of the organization, continuous investment to human resources is essential, especially to technical staff such as researchers and engineers responsible for innovation. But nonetheless practical and effective training programme is difficult to design.
We offer a wide variety of training scheme, customizable to the client's requirement, most of which are based on our real business experiences and so should be very effective to the technical people. The client can expect its staff will be able to master business skills and senses.

PR / IR management, Technology promotion

PR and IR is a key driver to improve awareness of the business. For technology-oriented business, appropriate promotion of the technological competitiveness is also essential. We advise strategic management of PR and IR, as well as technology promotion.

Charge and fee

We accept two types of payment; time-based charge and conditional fee (contingent fee). The former is employed for most of our consulting tasks while the latter is employed specifically for licensing, M&A and similar tasks, in which a successful outcome is not always guaranteed.

Time-based charge

The charge is calculated on the basis of elapsed time.
This applies to tasks such as management consulting, project management, contract research, and human resource development.
In practice, we ask our client to accept a charge calculated on daily basis.

Conditional fee (Contingent fee)

Some of our services do not guarantee a successful result by their nature, e.g. licensing and M&A. For these tasks we introduce a conditional fee (contingent fee), as traditionally used in the field.
The fee structure consists of initial charge and success fee; the former is paid for a minimal cost necessary to start the service, and the latter is paid along the so-called Lehman Scale only when the deal is done.

Besides the above payment, we usually need to charge additional cost for transport, accommodation, communication, printing and so on.

Consulting process

Here is a standard process of our consulting service.

We flexibly arrange and optimize the procedure depending on the task so as to achieve the best performance for the client.

Task force

The service is basically managed by ourselves, but external professionals are often invited to form a time-limited team, or task force, depending on the characteristics of the task. They include qualified professionals such as laywers, patent attorneys and accountants, and those who have extensive skills and experiences about a specific topic such as scientists and engineers.
By employing the external expertise in an appropriate stage, we maximize the team performance without causing unnecessary cost.

Regional coverage

The regional coverage of our service is centered at Sapporo, where the office is located, and reaches the Greater Tokyo and Osaka areas.

Cross-border projects are also proposed and managed.