Fujitsu Launchpad

The path

First designer at a venture studio — founding design for the ventures, then for the studio itself. I joined Launchpad three years ago as its first product designer. The job description was the ventures. The job turned out to be the level above them.

Year one: embed. The studio needed design to exist before it could be strategic — guidelines, a design process, design thinking embedded by hand into the first two or three ventures. I worked inside them as their founding designer, and they launched.

Then the pattern surfaced: ventures weren't failing at design. They were failing before it. Concepts arrived big — and backed by Fujitsu, which is exactly the danger. A big backer and a big idea make the basic questions feel beneath asking: what problem is this solving, why is it a problem, who already solves it and how. Skip those, and no amount of UX saves you. The frustrations were always the same downstream — can't expand, can't win customers, "users don't get it." It looks like a UX issue. It isn't. It's a problem issue.

So the work moved upstream: a reusable way to validate ventures before building them. Early-stage research methods, validation steps, a design process any new venture could pick up — design strategy as studio infrastructure rather than per-project heroics.

The studio itself was evolving, and the strategy had to evolve per stream. Launchpad began as a home for initiatives from inside the corporation; without a clear process and defined outcomes, incubation is hard anywhere — and Japan isn't the Bay Area: the startup skills — validating, researching, shipping lean — aren't ambient here the way they are there. Ideas grow when someone works alongside them, hands on, building the skills as much as the product. That became part of the job. The studio shifted to a mixed model — external startups, internal ideas, and parent-company initiatives, simultaneously — and each stream needs a different design strategy built on the same core. I pushed hard for that, stream by stream, team by team.

My operating principle here: build first, then make the case. My role doesn't come with authority over the studio's direction, so influence gets constructed the way designers construct anything — make the guideline or process, prove it inside a real venture, then bring it to leadership and peers with evidence in hand. It would be easy in a setting like this to stay pleasing and call comfort progress; I find the build-prove-propose route slower and much more fun.

The irony: the funnel kept changing, the pattern didn't. External startups, internal ideas, parent-company initiatives — different sources, and downstream, the same looks-like-a-UX-issue-isn't-one. That's a culture-level pattern, and no process document shifts a culture. It's why I initiated the design-thinking program — seminars and hands-on practice — the long route, so the studio's ability to question and create stops depending on any one designer.

The ventures

Eight ventures and counting, across three streams — plus the studio practice underneath them. A few are deepened in their own studies; the AI-age ones live on the AI explorations page.

Three years in, the work is still in motion. The first ventures shipped, the validation process gets used, the studio runs three streams where it started with one. Venture creation is hard everywhere — most of what decides a venture's fate sits outside any single discipline, and better validation improves the odds without guaranteeing them. That's precisely why it's worth a designer's time. And the funny footnote: I expected language to be my barrier in Japan. It was the least of them.