Kazuhiro Doi joined Nissan Motor after graduating the master’s program at the department of Instrumentation Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Keio University in 1985.

After 20 years of experiences at research and advanced engineering departments including two years experience at Penn State, he became General Manager for Technology Planning Department in 2005, where he managed the development of technology strategy that is the basis for competitive advantage today. Nissan’s advanced technologies were communicated by Technology Marketing Department he newly established in 2007. He also became a Segment Chief Product Specialist for Product Planning Department where he contributed to the launch of NISSAN compact segment, MICRA, NOTE, SUNNY etc.

In April 2012, he became Research Director for Renault. In April 2015, he was appointed as Vice President and Alliance Global Director for the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance.
In August 2020, he was appointed as Corporate Vice President to direct the research on future strategic fields, “Beyond Mobility” in Nissan.

In a career spanning more than 30 years for Nissan and Renault, he has been at the forefront of research and development for the automotive driving and electrification.

Guillaume Gerondeau is Vice President at Dassault Systèmes, Transportation and Mobility Industry Asia. He is an expert in digital business transformation and smart mobility.

Prior to Dassault Systèmes, he had a 30 years long career in the automotive industry as Senior International Innovation, Product, Marketing, Sales Executive and Strategy Consultant, having worked for Toyota, Nissan, Renault, Booz Allen (now Strategy&)
He joined Dassault Systèmes in 2015, based in Tokyo.

Guillaume has experience as an executive in almost all the areas of the value chain in the automobile industry focusing on defining and bringing customer centric innovations to market. Based in their headquarters in Japan, he was head of global product strategy and product planning at Nissan and of global brand strategy and product marketing at Toyota. He was the head of product planning and marketing for Toyota in Europe. At Renault, he managed a long-term research budget, led the innovation process and the reorganization of the R&D resource management and was managing director in Austria.
He also served as senior advisor of Booz Allen and Hamilton (now Strategy &) mainly working in the automotive sector.

Yumi Kawabata is a journalist focusing on automotive, environment and innovation. After obtaining an engineering degree from Gunma University, Japan, she worked as a design engineer at Sumitomo Electric. Her career as a journalist started when she joined NAVI, an automotive magazine as an editor. While working as a journalist, she also engages on promoting innovation in a wide range of fields, including fields other than mobility, based on the latest global technology knowledge. Having inaugurated as an innovation director at Roland Berger, she is also an advisor to Roland Berger.

Klaus Meder has held the post of the President and Representative Director Bosch Corporation, Tokyo, Japan since 2017. He is responsible for Japan as a country manager with about 7000 associates and about 4 bn Euro turnover including several activities in Thailand as well.

Klaus entered Bosch Corporation in 1987 and held numerous positions in the company, including Vice President and Director ASCO Corporation (joint venture with Bosch Corporation), Tomioka, Japan and Board Member of Division Chassis Systems Control, Abstatt, Germany. From 2012 to 2017 he was the President of Division Automotive Electronics, Reutlingen, Germany where he was responsible for strategic planning for one of the biggest divisions of Bosch with close to 30000 employees and 8 production sites.

He was awarded a degree in telecommunications and electronics from University of Darmstadt in 1987. In addition to native German, he is proficient in English and Japanese languages.

Takuji Okubo is the North Asia Director of The Economist Corporate Network, managing the Networks in Japan and in South Korea.

Prior to joining The Economist Group, Takuji was the Managing Director and Chief Economist at Japan Macro Advisors, serving global fortune 500 companies and financial institutions in Japan and abroad. In his past career, Takuji was a Chief Economist at Societe Generale, in charge of Japan and of South Korea, and a senior economist at Merrill Lynch and at Goldman Sachs. Outside his role at ECN, Takuji also serves as a non-executive director at Japan Risk Forum, an association of Chief Risk Officers among Japanese financial institutions.

Takuji holds B.A in Economics from Tokyo University and while at the university he was a recipient of prestigious INOUE scholarship. He holds MBA from INSEAD and Msc. In Economics from UPF in Barcelona. Apart from work, he enjoys motor-cycling, scuba-diving, cooking as well as worrying about the future of the Japanese economy.