Message from the Director and Dean

The Graduate School of System Design and Management (SDM) at Keio University cultivates future leaders with "cross-disciplinary expertise," granting the ability to leverage diversity. This is accomplished through education and research aimed at solving large-scale, complex problems and realizing social change through the creation of new values.

Set Objectives, Then Design and Achieve Their Fulfillment

In today's society, where diverse values exist side-by-side and different things are all interconnected and interact with each other, the whole can no longer be viewed as static. In fact, technology is evolving faster and faster, the intensity of various changes in the social environment is becoming more pronounced, and unexpected events are happening one after another.

In this kind of situation, it can be difficult to decide on what to aim for in the first place. If it were merely a matter of setting our objectives by looking at precedents and extrapolating from that alone, the task would be simple. However, technological advances have made it possible to do things that had not been possible up to now. Furthermore, changes in the social environment have made it necessary to set our aims differently from before. Thus, the next generation of leaders needs the ability to set the appropriate objectives to aim for. In other words, we need the ability to ask the right questions. Setting unfeasible objectives is meaningless if they cannot be achieved. In order to set the right objectives while keeping in mind the ideal society and the mechanism for achieving it, the ability to design such a mechanism is necessary as well.

In order to create such a design, one must fully understand the whole picture and define the parts that comprise it as well as their relationships to each other. And in order to implement this mechanism in society, it is necessary to design and execute a way to build consensus and move forward with various stakeholders. In other words, we need to handle such matters in an integrated, not piecemeal, manner.

Education and Research Leveraging Diversity

Since its establishment in 2008, Keio's SDM has been active in education and research to integrate "objective setting," "mechanism design," and "implementation management." To do so, it is important to "keep sight of both the forest and the trees." To this end, we aim to collaborate with a diverse group of people in order to understand matters from multiple perspectives and to utilize and integrate opinions from diverse viewpoints. This is the "cross-disciplinary expertise" that enables us to leverage our diversity.

In order to cross multiple academic fields utilizing this cross-disciplinary expertise, SDM provides a unique education consisting of knowledge in systems, design, and management, and actively conducts cross-disciplinary research. People from a broad range of ages come from all over the world to study together with a diverse group of students, researchers, and faculty members, all with different specialties, to discuss how to create a better society. We look forward to welcoming all who are interested in learning and researching together with a diverse group of people with the aim of realizing a better society and acquiring this cross-disciplinary expertise.