The LexisNexis® PatentSight+ Summit 2026 brought together IP professionals from across the Japanese industry for an afternoon of presentations, product updates, and panel debates, held in a hybrid format connecting a live audience in Tokyo with additional participants attending online. The theme: The Next Chapter of IP Strategy: How AI Is Shaping the Future of Management and Talent.
Opening the event, Marco Richter, Managing Director and Chief Commercial Officer of LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions, was direct about what he believes makes gatherings like this one worth holding. Every time he visits Japan, he said, he leaves impressed by the quality of thinking in the IP community and by the seriousness with which IP professionals here are working to advance their organizations. The summit, in his words, exists to give that community a platform to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and take one or two concrete insights back into their own organizations.
The backdrop to that exchange this year was the pace of change that every IP team is navigating. Generative AI and large language model-powered workflows are reshaping how IP functions operate, and the question is no longer just about efficiency. “How do we translate patent information into business decisions,” Mr. Richter asked, “and into language that the business will speak?” The three customer presentations that followed each answered that question in a different way.”
Speaker: Mr. Takeo Abe, Head of Intellectual Property Division, Daikin Industries
Mr. Abe opened with a clear point: the most important slide in his deck was not the one announcing Daikin’s Innovation Momentum Top 100 recognition for the third consecutive year. It was the one that followed. Using that recognition as an occasion to investigate which patents were driving their high PatentSight+ scores, Daikin cross-referenced their high-ranked patents across their HVAC and chemicals portfolios against their own internal filing-year commendation program. As a result, a strong correlation was observed between the two.
“The people who were most relieved by this were the ones who set our internal evaluation criteria,” Mr. Abe said. “And the fact that PatentSight+’s scores aligned with our own judgment told us the tool is genuinely reliable.”
Mr. Takeo AbeHead of Intellectual Property Division Daikin Industries The people who were most relieved by this were the ones who set our internal evaluation criteria. The fact that PatentSight+’s scores aligned with our own judgment told us the tool is genuinely reliable.
Mr. Takeo AbeHead of Intellectual Property Division Daikin Industries
The people who were most relieved by this were the ones who set our internal evaluation criteria. The fact that PatentSight+’s scores aligned with our own judgment told us the tool is genuinely reliable.
Mr. Abe went on to describe how Daikin is reshaping its IP function around AI, with in-house tools for patent summarisation, simplified patent mapping, and FTO noise filtering, underpinned by the “Daikin Information University,” a structured AI literacy program that has trained over several hundred employees since 2018. The broader organizational ambition is a shift away from siloed IP roles toward what he called an “accompaniment model,” where IP professionals work alongside business and R&D teams throughout a project rather than at defined handoff points.
Speaker: Mr. Takeshi Horikomi, Managing Executive Officer & CAO, ASICS Corporation
Mr. Horikomi’s session was built around a single turning point. When ASICS saw its New Year’s University Ekiden relay race market share fall to zero in 2021, the company launched C-PROJECT, a CEO-led initiative to reclaim the top of the performance running market, with the IP team involved from day one. The results were: gold medals in both triathlon events at the Tokyo Olympics, a 49% athlete share in triathlon at the Paris Olympics, back-to-back Boston Marathon victories, and an Ekiden share that recovered to 28.6% by early 2026. 81 patents have been filed in the METASPEED series alone.
The figure that drew the most attention was a chart showing ASICS’s Patent Asset Index, which was 1.0 in 2018 and reached 2.63 by 2025, and tracked alongside the company’s revenue growth over the same period. Mr. Horikomi was careful about how he framed it: “Of course, there are many factors. But IP management is one of them, and the numbers move together.”
That trajectory now appears in ASICS’s integrated report and earnings materials, a disclosure choice Mr. Horikomi described as central to investor dialogue. “PatentSight+ gives us credibility and objectivity. It works as a common language with our investors and analysts.”
Mr. Takeshi HorikomiManaging Executive Officer & CAOASICS Corporation “PatentSight+ gives us credibility and objectivity. It works as a common language with our investors and analysts.”
Mr. Takeshi HorikomiManaging Executive Officer & CAOASICS Corporation
“PatentSight+ gives us credibility and objectivity. It works as a common language with our investors and analysts.”
On governance, Mr. Horikomi described how ASICS’s IP Strategy Committee, originally run by the IP department, was redesigned so that business divisions own their IP strategies and present them to the committee, with IP acting in a support role. “The goal was always to make IP strategy something every part of the business thinks of as theirs.”
Speaker: Mr. Hideki Takayanagi, Head of Intellectual Property Division, EBARA Corporation
Mr. Takayanagi opened with a lesson from experience. In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, EBARA’s patent portfolio was subjected to large-scale cost-cutting because management could not clearly see its value to protect it. “IP has to speak the language of management,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it’s invisible.”
The response was the IP ROIC framework, a proprietary system mapping IP activity outputs to profit and capital efficiency across eight causal factors, built to mirror the ROIC logic that serves as EBARA’s top corporate KPI. Invention evaluations use four criteria: actual business use, necessity vs. alternatives, barriers to entry, and market demand, each calibrated for each business segment. Mr. Takayanagi showed that these internal scores correlate strongly with LexisNexis metrics, including Technology Relevance and Competitive Impact, providing the framework with external validation. “We can tell management: doing IP well internally also earns recognition externally.”
The framework is now used in quarterly meetings with each of EBARA’s five divisional presidents and senior technology leadership. “It’s (reports from PatentSight+) moved us from producing documents that sit in a drawer to conversations where executives are asking us to go deeper on specific competitors or explain what a trend means for their business.”
Mr. Hideki TakayanagiHead of Intellectual Property DivisionEBARA Corporation Reports from PatentSight+ moved us from producing documents that sit in a drawer to conversations where executives are asking us to go deeper on specific competitors or explain what a trend means for their business.
Mr. Hideki TakayanagiHead of Intellectual Property DivisionEBARA Corporation
Reports from PatentSight+ moved us from producing documents that sit in a drawer to conversations where executives are asking us to go deeper on specific competitors or explain what a trend means for their business.
The Summit concluded with a panel discussion moderated by Akihiro Saito, Strategic Advisor at LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. The panel featured Takeo Okuda, Principal Intangible Asset Strategist at OMRON; Kenzaburo Tamaru, Executive Officer and NTO at Microsoft Japan; Yasushi Matsuoka, who is responsible for intellectual property in the Technology Strategy Division at NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS; and Sakae Nakamura, Executive Advisor at LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions.
The discussion explored how the use of AI in IP is moving beyond routine efficiency gains into areas that directly shape business strategy. Tamaru placed this shift within the broader evolution of technology and described how AI agents are transforming organizations and work. Matsuoka explained how NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS applies generative AI to patent, market, technology, policy, regulatory, and internal data, using strategic frameworks such as 3C and VRIO analysis.
Okuda introduced the concept of “IP AI orchestration,” arguing that IP professionals need to evolve from individual users of AI tools into conductors who coordinate human–AI teams. Nakamura described AI as a powerful hypothesis-generation engine that can connect individual data points, identify possible relationships, and generate a wide range of hypotheses. She emphasized that humans must act as editors, selecting and refining the hypotheses that best align with the company’s strategy, distinctive strengths, and culture.
Nakamura also described how wider access to patent analysis is driving the democratization of IP landscape analysis. Rather than diminishing the IP function, this shift elevates IP professionals into roles as quality guardians and partners who work alongside business teams.
A question from the floor added a governance dimension, touching first on Japan’s 2021 Corporate Governance Code revision and then on the proposed 2026 revision, which had been published for public consultation in April. The draft placed intellectual property more explicitly within board-level discussions of growth investment, alongside capital expenditure, R&D, and human capital, reinforcing the strategic importance of IP within Japan’s corporate governance framework.
Across the discussion, one message was clear: as routine tasks increasingly shift to AI, the value of IP professionals will lie more in defining the right questions, setting meaningful goals, coordinating human–AI collaboration, and translating insights into business action. The conversation continued informally at the networking reception that followed.
Three companies, three industries, three different approaches to IP management, but one consistent theme running through the day: patent intelligence, used with purpose, improves the quality of decisions across the business.
The practitioners who presented at the summit were not just talking about future possibilities. They were sharing what is already working, what still needs to be solved, and what they have learned along the way. That kind of peer-level exchange is what makes events like this worth attending.
If you want to keep up with the ideas and conversations coming out of events like this one, subscribe to our newsletter and follow LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions on LinkedIn. We regularly share thought leadership, event recaps, webinar announcements, and practitioner insights that keep you up to date on where the IP profession is heading.
