Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: #8 Nobuyuki Akimoto

Nobuyuki Akimoto, executive vice-president and chief operating officer at NTT Docomo Ventures, Japan-based phone operator NTT Group’s corporate venture capital (CVC) unit, has spent more than a decade grappling with how to improve the development of strategic partnerships between big corporates and startups.

His move back to Japan from California to take up his latest role in March 2013 provided an opportunity to integrate his US and European startup insights with the parent company.

A month earlier, NTT had shaken up its corporate venturing units by integrating its NTT Investment Partners unit, which hunts out deals for the main business, with its Docomo Investment Fund Partnership pinpointing deals for its mobile phone subsidiary.

Since rebranding to form NTT Docomo Ventures that summer, Akimoto has been at the heart of an impressive global operation that has also seen US subsidiaries Docomo Innovations and Docomo Capital merge in October 2015 to help the resulting entity be a “gateway between Japan and Silicon Valley in the mobile market”.

Akimoto said: “We proactively support entrepreneurs on a worldwide scale.” This is especially true in Japan, the US, Europe and Israel. There is $300m to invest and “vast business development opportunities with the NTT Group of companies”.

Akimoto was the first president and CEO of Palo Alto, California-based Docomo Capital. Since 1999 he has held positions in charge of establishing new operations in Asia and Europe. He has been responsible for setting up R&D laboratories in Silicon Valley and Europe.

He said he was “chosen as a representative of NTT Group’s CVC based on my expertise and past experience in the field of open innovation acceleration in NTT”.

Former colleagues said they were inspired by his leadership. Jay Onda, now a Rising Star at motorbike-maker Yamaha, said: “Akimoto has provided leadership and guidance throughout Docomo’s investment activities throughout the past 10 years.

“With Docomo’s latest fund, he has led the expansion to invest in startups globally as well as creating an accelerator programme to further support the Japanese startup ecosystem.”

For his part, Akimoto believes further success will come from “building ‘big’ businesses and exercising a social impact by using our group’s business assets, such as technical and market expertise, as well as a mass of customer access through our respective companies”.

As an example, he cited the strategic returns for NTT Group after investing in OpSource, a cloud provider. “After the investment, we facilitated the business collaborations with our group operating companies,” such as NTT America. Dimension Data, a global systems integrator headquartered in South Africa acquired by NTT in 2010, then acquired OpSource the following July.

Akimoto said: “Dimension Data currently rolls out its cloud solutions and taps the global market with OpSource’s proven technology and its large customer base.”

Other business collaborations between portfolio companies and NTT include US-based cloud management solution provider CliQr and UK-based security technology provider Certivox.

Akimoto noted: “Regardless of investment, forming strategic partnership between big corporates and startups is a hard-to-attain and everlasting challenge for CVCs.

“It all depends on whether they can, first, have mutual understanding and general consensus about each individual’s needs, because mindset and intention between them occasionally differ substantially, and, second, lay out a situation whereby both can have the practical advantages after the partnership.”

He said he wanted NTT to be a “true role model for corporate VC”. NTT should be able to show how this could be achieved.

First, by “building instant business partnership in the NTT Group’s core business domains”.

Second, “acquiring and hedging future business opportunities and threats – those of 10 years from now – even in our non-core or weak-presence business fields, so that we can capture discontinuous or disruptive innovations using our future-looking investment”. Third and last, by “sourcing and taking in leading-edge and promising outside technologies as an important means of our R&D activities”.

And while Akimoto is focused on NTT’s success, he said all CVCs could better work together to “create a carefully controlled quality community to stimulate information distribution and communication” as well as through providing more public information and case studies.

This would “drive the open innovation activities forward by becoming a platform to intensify intercommunication among various entities, for example, startups, corporates, academics, research institutes, governments”.