Looking at our past, Canon has all along been a manufacturing enterprise that has constantly polished its craftsmanship in such areas of technology as processing and measurement. At the same time we have built up all-round development capabilities based on its device technology, optics, design technology and so forth. I feel that Canon derives its current strength from the integration of such capabilities with other information technology including image processing, and it's my hope that we can leverage nanotechnology to increase the number of competences that contribute to our overall strength. To do so, rather than focusing all of our R&D resources on one particular field of technology, we need to rather focus on the boundaries between different fields, including completely new fields. As such, our R&D endeavors from now on could be characterized by the words "new frontiers".

Well, DNA and other biomolecules are also the territory of nanotechnology. Nanotech serves as a kind of bridge over the boundary of biotech and conventional engineering. And nano-manufacturing sizes tend to overlap with the sizes of visible light wavelengths. In short, nanotech also straddles the border between optics and manufacturing technology. The themes that we're currently focusing on in nanotech, such as nanobionics, nanophotonics, nanodevices and so forth, are all concerned with investigating phenomena in these new boundary areas. New functions or technologies that emerge from this research will probably not have any immediate applicability, but we'll be seeking to fuse them with existing technologies to see what kind of new possibilities emerge.

DNA Spots on a DNA Chip

Absolutely. "Fusion" is vital to the uncovering of new possibilities. In fact, you could even say that achieving fusion is more important than being on the leading edge, and communication and exchange of information with researchers from a diversity of fields is becoming more and more important.

I see Canon's mission as leveraging its imaging technologies to develop new means of enabling more advanced communication. That's why, as I mentioned earlier, we're investigating the development of technologies for communicating mood and emotion. Achieving our dreams in this area will almost certainly require the fusion and integration of research into the way humans function — the way our sensory organs and brains work, the mechanisms governing our behavior and emotions and so on — with an array of technologies, including communications technology, optics, sensor and analysis technology.

Canon's Mesoporous Materials Technology Recognized in Technical Journals