Yosuke Horikoshi (Japan)

In this poster presentation, I would like to introduce some philosophical activities as business consultancy in Japan. Our company, Cross Philosophies Ltd., has dealt with more than 20 Japanese companies offering philosophical thinking, dialogue, inquiry and knowledge as employee training, market research, and reconstructing of company vision since 2016. As employee training, for instance, we offer philosophical dialogue sessions with trained facilitators and talk about company missions, work environment, relationship and sometimes just philosophical problems which are irrelevant to their difficulties per se. This often makes the employees think critically and understand with each other in a different way from what they have done so far. Also, we offer philosophical knowledge to our customers in accordance with their interest business strategy and mission. In this case, we give a lecture on Philosophy or write a report on between their business project/mission and philosophical knowledge. This opens a new horizon and gives a basis of their corporate vision in terms of philosophy. As a part of marketing research, we provide a philosophical inquiry session as in philosophy café. This aims to conduct research on what people think so that our customer company can make a marketing strategy. While our business has succeeded to some extent as above and given philosophy researchers opportunities to be active out of academia there are some difficulties to adjust philosophy to the business setting in Japan. In this poster presentation, I would like to introduce these pros and cons with some actual cases as well.