Proposing future financial services

The final presentation session for the graduate course Design Thinking was held at Sumitomo MItsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) headquater, Tokyo, on August 1st. This year SMBC provided us with design topics. Five groups of graduate students worked on the topics through design projects for four months over 1st and 2nd quarters. On that day they gave presentation of their final proposals of novel financial services.

A number of SMBC people, including Senior General Manager Mr. Osamu Itagaki, joined the presentation session and gave a number of questions and comments for presentations by students. It should be a valuable learning opportunity for the students to have feedbacks from viewpoints of porfessionals.

In this Design Thinking course, all activities including final presentation are conducted in English language. This year, for each of five groups, more than half of team members were international students. These students joined from diverse departments across Tokyo Tech. We believe that the students could have developed their proposals taking full advantages of thier diverse viewpoints and backgrounds.

For the next year and future, this course is supposed to evolve further, tackling various problems in the society to propose useful solutions.

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