Journey

The foundation of Canon's IP personnel development is independent self-growth, in line with the company's guiding principle of the San-ji Spirit (“Three Selfs”: self-motivation, self-management, and self-awareness). To provide environments for encouraging self-growth, we place importance on individual employees having the desire to direct their own growth and the willingness of supervisors and senior employees to nurture subordinates and junior employees. To this end, we have introduced HR development programmes to enhance employee's value as IP professionals.

The basic HR development policy is to hone practical skills thoroughly in the workplace (with on-the-job training) and broaden the base of knowledge through interactions with many different people during the first few years of an employee's career. The aim is to grow into IP professionals in specific fields with a high level of expertise and perseverance while making the “Canon IP DNA”, which has been passed down through the decades, their own. As employees mature into professionals, they not only deepen their field-specific expertise (e.g. the patent filing & prosecution field), but also absorb knowledge about adjacent fields (e.g. litigation and licensing fields in the case of patent engineers). In the next stage, employees broaden their experience, acquire grit and a sound sense of proportion, and grow into IP department leaders through work experience in various fields by rotations within IP Headquarters, postings at Group companies, government agencies, and IP-related organizations, and work on committees in external organizations. Later in their careers, once employees reach senior management levels, they try to be IP talents who can formulate and execute the Group's IP strategies as well as contribute to the development of Japan's IP policy and the global IP ecosystem by delivering Canon's position and opinions to outside parties.

It is important for IP people working at a company to plan global IP strategies and manage IP activities from a far-reaching, long-term perspective with the understanding of a diversity of values. This is why we believe it is vital that we provide IP department employees with a variety of experiences. In this respect, Canon's IP Headquarters have an environment in which individual employees, in the process of deepening their expertise through their own work, often work in collaboration with other departments within IP Headquarters, other headquarters within the company, and organizations outside the company where they can gain a wide spectrum of practical experience. In addition, we provide opportunities to gain different experiences through internal rotations at IP Headquarters, employee exchanges with domestic and overseas Group companies, and participation in committee activities in external organizations. One distinction of our HR development programme is the vast number of postings available at many different locations, including various Group companies in the U.S., the UK, France, the Netherlands, China, Singapore, Australia and Japan; government agencies such as the Cabinet Office, the Japan Patent Office, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry; and IP-related organizations such as the Institute of Intellectual Property. Another distinction is that at any given time, dozens of IP employees are posted outside the company, while many employees posted from Group companies are hosted at IP Headquarters. Working in different environments and interacting with people with different experiences does more than just deepen their personal experiences; it broadens their worldview, improves their ability to respond to diversity, and elevates their outlook, which leads to better strategic planning and management capabilities mentioned above.

As we have seen, Canon provides development programmes tailored to where employees are in their careers and offers opportunities to gain a broad range of experiences. In this environment, employees can increase their value as IP professionals and grow to be IP professionals with meaningful impacts in IP fields.