After a rather long flight from Germany, the GCL team first arrived in Tokyo, where Hans Reitz held a speech at the TEDxTokyo. We continued our journey further south towards Fukuoka on Kyushu Island. There we had a great week at Kyushu University, where we held the first training week at a university worldwide with Prof. Masaharu Okada and his team.
Kyushu University has 20,000 students and GCL@Kyushu University is the first Grameen Creative Lab worldwide established at a university! The rather unknown city of Fukuoka is considered to be the new hot spot of Japan, home to many medium-sized companies with the potential to become the new economic leaders of Japan.
After an intense week of training on social business as well as strategy sessions, the organizational set-up as well as the activities of GCL@Kyushu University have been defined. GCL@Kyushu University will not only be a hub for students to work on social business ideas but will be home to professors of different disciplines (e.g. agriculture, biology, business, law) conducting research on how social business plays into their field of expertise. Thus Kyushu University will significantly contribute to the promotion of social business as well as continue building a theoretical scientific fundament for social business.
Returning to Germany with many great impressions, the GCL team is looking forward to a fruitful cooperation in the future.