The One Team You Can’t Afford to Neglect When Entering Japan
To a foreign startup, Japanese corporations may seem like impenetrable fortresses. With layered decision-making, traditional processes, risk aversion, and long-term relationship requirements, the sales cycle can feel daunting to an outsider.
However, there is a strategic entry point that many overlook: the specialized Innovation team. For simplicity, I may refer to the "Innovation team," but more broadly, I am referring to Digital, New Business, and Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) teams—those with a mandate to identify external technology and startups. In my work helping startups scale in Japan, I've found that if you were to pick just one team or unit across a corporation, this is the most efficient path to revenue.
Here are the three reasons why these teams are your most critical allies.
1. The Mandate for New Business and Revenue
When I first started doing business in Japan in 2016, I was surprised to see titles like “New Business Creation” or “New Business Promotion” on business cards. At the time, those were unfamiliar titles to me. Today, “New Business” titles are commonplace, illustrating the massive emphasis Japanese corporations are now placing on innovation and new revenue streams.
I’ve often heard from these teams that their company has given them a specific mission to hunt for new opportunities because they need to “diversify revenue streams.” The evolution of these titles and departments reflects a growing openness to collaboration with foreign startups for the purpose of open innovation.
Japanese companies now often have board-level mandates to diversify their revenue and identify new revenue streams.
2. They are your Internal Advocates
One of the biggest hurdles in Japan (and many other places in the world) is the "not-invented-here" (or “not-invented-in-Japan”) syndrome. This is understandable. A traditional Business Unit (BU) is measured on the stability and incremental improvement of existing operations. Naturally, an external AI solution can be seen as a disruption to the current process or a risk to established workflows. Additionally, evaluating startup technology and making sense of it may be a completely different skillset from that which the BU is executing.
Innovation teams have a different mandate and expertise. Their responsibility is to scout and evaluate global technology to diversify the company's revenue streams and ensure accelerated innovation.
I recently saw this play out with two competing Japanese giants. One BU team was understandably focused on protecting their current roadmap. The other, led by an Innovation champion, was highly responsive to a discussion on open innovation and collaboration.
When I pointed this discrepancy out to my contact at the corporation that showed enthusiasm, he said: “Our team’s role is to ensure the best technology wins, no matter where it comes from.” This sums it up perfectly: you need a team whose specific KPI is to be an unbiased bridge to give your technology a fair shot at being evaluated.
3. Innovation teams solve the rotation system challenge
Japanese corporations famously rotate employees every few years. Even with a multi-threaded sales approach, a startup faces a unique structural risk: a key champion in a BU (e.g., supply chain or risk) may be moved to a different region or role mid-conversation and mid-engagement.
Innovation teams, however, provide the institutional continuity needed to bridge these transitions. They act as an anchor. Furthermore, in my experience, these individuals stay connected to the innovation and digital ecosystem long-term, becoming permanent nodes in your professional network.
We are all increasingly busy and under pressure to perform. In a market as complex as Japan, this means we must be tenacious with our strategies. We don’t have time to waste, and we need to choose the highest probability strategies.
Focusing on the innovation team is one of those strategies that makes all the difference when entering and expanding in Japan.