[Founder] Shingo, co-founder of Impact HUB Tokyo about Social Entrepreneurship in Japan.
Inour series of Founders portraits, we meet inspiring individuals from very various backgrounds, who have embarked at some point in their life in a journey leading them to open a coworking space. We sit down with them and discuss how they did it, the challenges they encounter and the good things it brings to them on a daily basis.
While in Tokyo, we met Shingo, co-founder of Impact HUB Tokyo, the place in town to work on social entrepreneurship. With him we spoke about the beginnings, the growth as well as Japan’s current challenges and how a place like Impact HUB can support and innovate with the wider local communities. A fascinating chat we highly recommend you to read!
Why did you decide to open Impact Hub in Tokyo?
I was in London, I was actually a banker. 2008 happened and the world got hit by a big financial crisis. 2008 was also the time in London where startups were growing. A lot of interesting things were happening there and I somehow became closer to the ecosystem. It was also the time when Google Campus opened their campus there, organizing a lot of pitch events.
During those years, I was myself a user of Impact Hub Westminster, the largest co-working space in London at the time. It was a very new concept to me, to work collaboratively. That fascinated me. As a member, I have to say at first I didn’t really get the concept of social innovation.
I decided to move back to Japan for personal reasons in 2012. Just before I left the UK, I was really into investing and advising startups. At the time, there were a lot of companies getting funded very quickly. I thought I would do something similar coming back to Tokyo: find cool startups, invest in them and advise them.
Startups in Japan around those years were “trying to be American” or clones of American startups. I did not really see any interesting startups so I thought “OK let’s take a step back and let’s incubate some interesting ones”. I thought I could use my background as a banker to advise them on their financial/business plans. To do that, I joined forces with my co-founder of Impact HUB Tokyo. I became a co-founder and Director. After starting Impact HUB Tokyo, we learned a lot, including the realization that our learnings were limited to within the walls of our Impact HUB and the real innovators are always outside of these walls. Technically speaking, we can’t have big enough Impact HUB to gather everybody.
I am very interested in smart cities, smart buildings and wanted to do some research on that. I founded a company for doing pure research on the interdependency between social systems. Once complex social system problems are solved or problems occur it’s not because of one single reason. It’s because of a lot of complex social reasons. We don’t really have a way to track the non-financial transactions that takes place when complex problems are solved. We are good at following the money but more valuable things are usually non-financial, like transfer of knowledge or even just a simple favor.
Now, innovation is probably to do with the flow of these things. It’s not really about how many great superstar we have, although they can be influential or they can inspire many people. To talk about city innovation, we have to talk about social systems and complex systems. Recently, we conducted a research into how people worry about money. People don’t get into financial problems just because of one reason. Same for recovering from financial problems: it’s about the access to information, education, or just friends — a lot of these things become pretty handy when you try to recover from financial problems.
We currently work on projects that try to solve complex social issues, like “how to save remote cities from disappearing” (In Japan, many cities face extinction due to aging and exodus of younger generations), or “how can we host open collaboration between corporates” (much like collaboration between startups).
So, right now we are trying to use words like decentralizing innovation or democratizing innovation. We also talk about diversity because this is a game of statistics. Corporates will come to ask us “can you teach us how to do an innovation hub?”. What we can do for them is increasing the probability of this innovation to happen. For that to happen, statistically speaking, we need to move towards diverse communities, rather than closed or narrow ones.
You don’t have to agree with everybody, you might disagree with people and that’s when, probably, innovation happens. That’s why we need communities with diverse people.
Coworking spaces are brands. Usually, coworking communities identify themselves as tech community, maker community, social entrepreneurship community and so on. I think you have to mix them up.
At Impact HUB we love experimenting. Right now, we have a few chefs in our community who want to collaborate with entrepreneurs in our community, to seek different ways to integrate cooking into our lives or to eat more healthily. Chefs are trying to work outside of their kitchens to do this and they are very interested in our space and community. That’s an example of my idea of a diverse community. Impact HUB Tokyo’s lounge walls are usually covered in arts of various forms throughout the year. We mix everyone and we see what happens. Diversity is the key for us.
I went on a bit more than answering the question (laughing).
Why did you decide to use the brand Impact HUB and not just create your own brand?
The love for Impact HUB as a brand came more from my co-founder but as I was a user of Impact HUB and I really liked it. Impact HUB 5 years ago was quite different, much smaller. Now we are much bigger, We were #36th I believe or 37th Impact Hub in the world and we now have 120 or more. For the first time in my life, I finally felt I was amongst like-minded people when meeting other founders of Impact HUBs. It was great. That made me certain this is what I want to be doing. I can’t remember clearly what was the “Aha!” moment 6 years ago when I decided to become an Impact HUB operator but I think it was to do with the fact that startups who are not just motivated by money are far most interesting to work with.
Talking about Social Entrepreneurship in Japan, what is your view on it? How would you define the community here?
When we started 6 years ago, Japan had experienced, a few years back, a massive earthquake. After the earthquake, what happened was that many people became social entrepreneurs. What it really meant was that a lot of “social businesses” got funded by grants and donations. However, most of them became unsustainable after a few years.
It gave social entrepreneurship a negative name, so we never used it in Japanese. We kept using other words like change-makers or impact-makers.
Nowadays, every big corporations here have to have social innovation. It is on everybody’s lips but it does not mean everyone understands what it actually means. One thing that is quite unique to Japan and maybe South East Asia too, is that there is a general understanding that we look after the community that we exist. The negative side of it means you have to keep harmony, get along with your neighbors, you can’t upset your neighbors and you can’t be the odd one. If you think about it, the flip side of that concept means you have to constantly be aware of what is around you. So, this awareness is quite a key to build large scale social innovation. Not everybody can be Elon Musk. If the world was full of people like him, maybe it would be a better place (or not?!).
Actually, the chances are that we are going to have subtle innovations everywhere and for that to sustain you have to be aware of who is doing what and how you can help them or how you can get helped by others.
That kind of thinking comes more naturally here so I found a lot of the conversations a lot easier, in the context of interdependencies and mass-scale behavior change. That’s what unique here. Japan is very diverse. I feel that the Japanese way of thinking is quite diverse. For example, they tolerate huge diversity of religions. Even dodgy cults are tolerated here. I find Japanese society to be more diverse in terms of freedom of thinking compared to Europe.
Do you think it will change with the new policies of the government to allow foreign workers to come and live in Japan?
The country is actually already full of migrant workers. So I don’t know if much will change. The society here is aging. They can’t grow rice anymore, they are not physically available to do it. For example, I live in Nagano, which is in the mountains. Many large farms here, they hire Asian migrants to support them.
Now that you mention the countryside, we’ve seen in Europe coworking spaces opening in rural areas. Do you see that happening in Japan?
We are actually doing that ourselves at Impact HUB Tokyo.
We are very much interested in being connected to neighboring cities. We just helped a local government open a coworking space. It’s probably one of the first local authorities operated coworking space.
We are basically transferring our knowledge to them on how to maintain a community, how to run events, etc. We are trying to change the jobs of local governments and also trying to start a movement. Every city with a sizable library — which was a place where you get knowledge before the internet came along — should have a coworking space. We realized that we need a new mode of sharing knowledge or information in rural areas. Coworking spaces are a great infrastructure for that. People working for the governments have not been recruited with that in mind so we work with them to nurture necessary skills to host such communities.
Innovation there is not about tech startups. It’s about farming and crafts, which are often very closely interdependent on their way of life. The dynamics are different. We look at how we can make them collaborate to make those cities more sustainable and eventually avoid extinction. Which is a very different challenge. In Japan, up until now, it was all about big cities but it is changing. People are looking at smaller cities too.
Changes are more visible in smaller cities, too. If you decide to change something there, your impact is visible immediately and it’s also probably more measurable than big cities like Tokyo. We work with 3 cities at the moment on those kinds of projects to make them more innovative. We work with Corporates too. We are experiencing different business models to see what works the best depending on the environment and how we can drive change the best.
How do you see this HUB growing?
We are still steadily growing. We want to keep this HUB as the cutting edge of new concepts and new programs. The neighbourhood is right for that. We can experiment and take a few risks. Then we can take what worked here to the regional cities also. In terms of volume, we are not going for any big changes. We will have to move eventually when the lease expires in ⅘ years but we will start planning that in a year or two. We don’t want to open other Impact HUB but rather to focus on what we have now.
How important it is for a coworking space to educate its members?
It’s an interesting question and I guess it depends on the community you have. I believe it’s a community-led demand. We never considered ourselves as educators.
The coworking space itself is a tool for the community. They needed it, we did it. This is the right size for them.
The software inside and the programs, we have a lot of them from all around the world and it’s because the community needed it. When people choose between different coworking spaces, why would they choose one? If they chose one place because it looks new, modern, etc, those people won’t stay long because as soon as something new and better comes, they’ll move out. But the people who choose our space because of the community, they stay longer. Our role is to make sure the community is always interesting, not to teach certain things. But we make sure they feel supported to try anything they want to try and in turn, they inspire us and our community.
