Since the Company provides a wide variety of material products that support industry and daily life, and the business environment of each business division varies greatly, each division formulates its own intellectual property strategy based on the Company’s management policies. Furthermore, to ensure we can quickly respond to rapid market changes, the R&D department has also formulated an intellectual property strategy to promote new research that will lead to new business ventures across divisions.

The Patent Department is responsible for advancing these intellectual property strategies and helping to secure a competitive advantage of our businesses in the marketplace through the acquisition, management, and utilization of intellectual property. Specifically, we aim to secure a competitive advantage that contributes to the Company’s profitability by working closely with the R&D department to quickly and reliably acquire the rights to the results of R&D activities that create unrivaled value.

Companies and institutions eligible for this award are selected based on the number of patent applications and rights over the past five years, and are then evaluated based on a combination of “Influence,” “Investment,” “Success,” and “Rarity.” Shin-Etsu Chemical scored particularly high in the areas of “Influence” (assessed through the frequency of citations by downstream patent applications) and “Rarity” (an index for measuring the distinctiveness of an invention in terms of how diverse a combination of technologies it contains compared to existing similar inventions). Our high “Rarity” score in particular is evidence to me that we are carrying out highly original, cutting-edge R&D.

Traditionally, the Company has engaged in mainly “defensive” intellectual property activities from the perspective of ensuring business continuity and flexibility. Over the past 10 to 20 years, however, while continuing these “defensive” activities, we have begun to move toward “offensive” intellectual property activities. These are exclusionary activities focused on securing our competitive advantage over other companies and building barriers to entry.

Traditionally, we protected our products primarily through patent rights and trademark rights. For our products with distinctive product forms, however, we have begun to actively acquire design rights to provide another layer of protection. One example is our insect pest control delivery device that diffuses insect pheromone components into agricultural fields. Another example is our stamp component for transferring microstructures, which is used to transfer microstructures such as semiconductor elements for micro LED displays.

I would like to utilize new tools such as generative AI to improve the efficiency of various intellectual property-related tasks. In particular, I would like to work closely with the R&D department to strengthen our efforts to search for and acquire the rights to solutions that meet customer needs starting from the idea generation stage in a way that transcends the boundaries between departments.

Furthermore, with regard to the intellectual property that is generated though our R&D activities, I would like to pursue a strategic combination of acquiring rights by filing applications and keeping it secret in the form of know-how, with the goal of building stronger barriers to entry for other companies.