Satoshi Kabasawa, Dr. of Engineering

Councilor
Technology Strategy Group
Corporate R&D Strategy Office
Panasonic Corporation

Part-time Professor
Graduate School of Media and Governance
Keio University

Satoshi Kabasawa is one of the leaders in the corporate venture capital (CVC) arena in Japan, and has been conducting strategic equity investments in cutting-edge technology start-ups for Panasonic corporate R&D. He established a CVC arm in Silicon Valley in 1998, and has been in charge of overseeing its operation as well as the CVC operation in Japan. He was Managing Director of Panasonic Digital Concepts Center (PDCC) through 2003, which was the CVC arm in Silicon Valley, and is now known as Panasonic Venture Group, and returned to Japan to expand CVC operation worldwide in 2004. So far his team has 40 portfolios in US, Japan, and EU; one third of them have been successfully liquidated and half of them have been successful developing a strategic technology relationship with Panasonic through his team’s efforts.

Just after graduation from a doctoral course in the telecommunication engineering arena, he joined Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), and started another research career on speech processing technologies. Through such research activities, he extended his research interests and efforts to a combination of speech processing (SP) technologies and natural language processing (NLP) technologies. With various outcomes in technology researches, he expanded his career to international R&D management, and established and drove a collaborative relation between a US University and Panasonic on a spoken multi-language translation project, which project lead to a world-wide Panasonic global research including Panasonic labs in Japan, US, Taiwan, and China.

Due to his international and inter-cultural project experience, he was much involved in Panasonic overseas R&D lab operations during his senior career.