A visionary whose hands are on the move

• Yoichi Ochiai “In the end, the visionary whose hands are moving is the strongest.
• from Ideas without implementation are no longer needed.

What are your thoughts on whether or not this is a job for visionaries and whether or not it is a business, that is, whether or not there is “economic rationality”? Ochiai: Actually, economic rationality is very important, and I think there is a limit to technology that cannot solve this problem. Technology that can solve the problem of economic rationality is usually broken by the emergence of rich people. It grows on its own to some extent. On the other hand, impact is critically important for non-economically rational technology. Therefore, “Transform non-economically rational technology into economically rational technology through impact.” is the biggest breakthrough. Because economically rational technology is incremental. Technology that is not economically rational is not, so innovation is needed. How to make an impact that makes everyone want to do it is the most important issue for innovation. Relationship between economic rationality and impact In this figure, impact and publicity are important to move to the upper right. Since impact and publicity have been successfully achieved, development is progressing, including applications. That is innovation. So, first of all, we must challenge technologies that have no economic rationale. Then, visionaries will make an impact there. It is difficult, but that is the most fun part.

So you are saying that just working hard will not be enough to get the technology out into the world and have an impact. Ochiai: The 21st century is the age of character. We must have impact, overcome economic rationality, and come out on the top right. To do that, it is totally impossible to do it in the traditional way. You absolutely need a visionary, and you need a team based on vision. In a large company, the money-making engine can run without a vision and survive, but a team is a group of individuals, so you need a strong vision. I am good at thinking, and I am good at moving things around, but I can’t turn things around by myself. If you have a vision, you can go right to the top as a team. Innovation can be realized. If you say you want to do something and keep moving, the first buds will appear. Once the first buds appear, it’s a matter of finding a rich person or earning publicity, and things will change quickly. That is the principle of leverage.

Do you feel that there is a lack of vital visionaries in Japan today? Ochiai: We are short not only of visionaries, but also of people with moving hands. In the end, “Hands movingvisionaries” are the strongest. If you ask whether there are not enough visionaries or not enough people with moving hands, well, I don’t know. I think there are few of both. It would seem that hands would move with experience, but that is not the case. The kind of hand movement required by visionaries is not incremental, but something completely new. Innovation doesn’t happen because you can write the server side. It’s, “Can you implement that server functionality in a plant cell?” Can you make a server that rides on a neuron?” There are only a limited number of engineers who can say “Yes. That is what I am talking about.

So you are saying that the job of a visionary is not just concept and team building. We need to at least get our own hands on it and get it to prototype. Ochiai: Visionaries must have their hands on the wheel. However, it is not easy to create a prototype. Once you get to that point, you can do the rest. It is very difficult to get to that point. That is why visionaries have no choice but to do it. You have to do experiments and persuade people to do experiments. I often tell people in my laboratory, “Be like Char from Gundam. Char is a general, but he is also the strongest soldier in Ippei. That is what makes Gundam cool. The same goes for musicians. When it comes to live performances, there are more people on the team, but the core values are created by the musicians themselves, who stay up all night and create as if they were dying.

I am reminded of what Elon Musk of Tesla Motors said, “I am always amazed at how many people are trying to build a great company without having a great product. Ochiai: I believe that the 20th century was swept up by the Germans. Marx, McLuhan, etc. The long Cold War period from 1945 to 1989 was almost a Karl Marx testing ground. Marx killed a lot of people because of his ideas. As far as media is concerned, the multimedia era is basically the world of media theory as McLuhan described it. The invention of the projector by the Lumière brothers was the most important means of propaganda in the 20th century, and propaganda was the most important part of statecraft. This is the essential framework of the 21st century, which is now about to be disrupted by the Internet. The same is true of design and human cognition. The Internet was born almost spontaneously. Just as Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, or Arpanet became the Internet, the flow of information has existed almost spontaneously. There is no ideology there. That is why the question, “How can we create a thought for the 21st century?” is a very important theme for me. We just have to come up with something more interesting than Marx. I am quite interested in how to realize and install that idea in people. As a means to achieve this, I am now working on digital nature, where people, nature, and computers exist without boundaries.

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