Dean's Message

The graduate school of innovation management was established in April, 2005 as the 6th graduate school at Tokyo Institute of Technology. This graduate school offers a major in management of technology, which is the first professional graduate program at the university (professional degree course: MA) as well as a major in innovation at the doctorate level. The graduate school aims to address the Japan's situation—although this country has been acclaimed for its industrial competitiveness as a top global player in technology and patents for years, it has at the very same time suffered from weak management of the same, resulting in a remarkable drop in Japan's ranking.

MOT, or the management of technology, can be defined as the management of the innovation creation cycle, which is the undertaking of creating a technology, utilizing it as intellectual property and commercializing it. To put it another way, if the MBA offers the techniques of business administration for the management of wealth, the MOT is about the management of technology and can be said to be managing the creation of a more uncertain wealth.

Managers who are capable of dealing with this uncertainty will become the CTOs (chief technology officers) and the CEOs (chief executive officers) of the future. The aim of the technology management program at the university is to produce talented managers who excel at this. Alternatively, our mission for the innovation major is to produce talented persons at the doctorate level who will be in charge of education and research in the field of technology management as those talents are currently in short. This doctorate level program in technology management which was established in line with the master's program is one feature of this university that no other school can match.

In addition to specialized faculty in the fields of technology management strategy, intellectual property management, and finance and IT, professors from disciplines across our campus who represent each technological field will give lectures in cutting-edge technologies as associated faculty. This is another of our strengths that you won't find at another university—our graduate school operates with the support of the entire campus.

A difference between our professional graduate program and a traditional master's program is how we place emphasis on students taking a systematically arranged set of classes and because graduation is achieved not via a master's thesis but via a final examination of a student's project report. For that reason, we established the number of credits required to graduate at 40. Because we are proactive in recognizing credits already taken in technical subjects, it is entirely possible under our system to complete the course in an accelerated period of time, such as 1 year.

At the current time, the larger part of our students now in the graduate school in management of technology are working students. In a similar vein, we are very keen that our existing students complete a minor or make good use of our dual degree program, which we established in April 2006 for our doctoral candidates. In addition to a deep specialization at the researcher level, it is fair to say that studying management of technology is directly linked to developing T-shaped people (talented persons having skills and knowledge that are both deep and broad), who are so in demand in graduate school education today.