At the Nomura-SRI Innovation Center, Cowart leads a team that equips corporate innovators with tools, mindsets, and strategies to create technology-driven change.
Chris Cowart is the managing director of the Nomura-SRI Innovation Center (NSIC).
Here, he explains what drew him to SRI and describes how NSIC has grown into a vibrant hub for intrapreneurs focused on driving impactful change in their companies.
You joined SRI to lead the Nomura-SRI Innovation Center, which you helped launch in 2021. What about that effort attracted you?
SRI has been working with groundbreaking companies in Japan since the 1960s. In 2021, SRI and Nomura Holdings decided to deepen this connection even further by redefining how Japanese companies do innovation. NSIC now runs four core programs designed to engage Japanese corporate innovators in a deep, structured exploration of how to catalyze technology-driven growth and new business opportunities.
I saw this as a tremendous opportunity to take what I’d learned from 25 years in Silicon Valley and use it to build an innovation program and open innovation center from scratch.
“We’re sharing an innovation process and mindset that draws on the capabilities and collective experience of this world-class research institute that literally invented the future we live in today.” — Chris Cowart
SRI played a major role in creating the operating system that is Silicon Valley. We’ve been in the middle of creating entire industries like personal computing, networking, AI, robotics, and much more. I like to think of NSIC as one of the “front doors” of SRI. We connect companies with the cutting-edge technologies that are reshaping Silicon Valley and global technology investment in real time. And at the same time, we’re sharing an innovation process and mindset that draws on the capabilities and collective experience of this world-class research institute that literally invented the future we live in today.
Prior to joining SRI, you were able to see the innovation process from multiple angles. You’ve worked with venture capital firms, you led product design teams at IDEO, you’ve taught innovation-focused classes with Singularity University, and you’ve worked with startups in areas like food tech and sports tech. Is there a particular thread that holds those different interests and experiences together?
So I moved to Silicon Valley in the mid-90s to join IDEO. We were thought of as the secret design team behind many of the startups and emerging technology companies of Silicon Valley. We were articulating what it meant to design in a multidisciplinary and a human-centered way. We all called ourselves designers. No matter what our university degrees said, we were designers.
I took a pause at IDEO for a couple of years and went to Stanford for business school, so that added another dimension: business vocabulary and mechanics, and seeing how to design businesses and run organizations, not just solve design problems.
“It’s not just about building a market solution but also strengthening the organizational capacity to evolve that solution and capture lasting value.” — Chris Cowart
Since then, much of my work has revolved around the question of: How do you take that toolkit of human-centered design insights and prototyping — all of the things that were at the core of the “design thinking” revolution — and apply it not just to product design, but also to teams and organizations?
It’s not just about building a market solution but also strengthening the organizational capacity to evolve that solution and capture lasting value. My internal compass has really revolved around developing a full-stack innovation toolkit that helps companies forecast the future and then build capacity to meet that future.
How does that mindset flow into the NSIC programs, specifically?
It dawned on me when we were building NSIC in 2021 that the “spirit animal” of the center was going to be the “intrapreneur.” Over my career, I had been watching these incredibly talented, driven, ambitious intrapreneurs inside organizations like Procter & Gamble and Gillette and Medtronic and Pfizer. They knew how to identify opportunities inside these large organizations. They could rally internal and external forces with technical knowledge and budgets to create new businesses.
I had been watching them do their magic all along, from my early days at IDEO, and those are exactly the kind of people we now equip though the programs we continuously operate at SRI.
This year, we had the opportunity to bring this program to intrapreneurs who need to stay closer to their companies in Japan. Ninety-five percent of our programming happens in Menlo Park, and our new hybrid program brings this toolkit to a program that’s based in Tokyo and delivered over a compressed 12-week period. It’s a new way to bring these innovation insights to the people who are in the best position to make use of them.
A significant piece of the NSIC program involves connecting program participants with SRI scientists and engineers to explore the future of innovation. What areas of SRI’s technical work are sparking interest?
SRI often represents the future of technology: What is going to be making a huge impact in the next five-to-seven years. That’s exciting for researchers, for people building businesses, and for investors.
Today, unsurprisingly, a lot of those conversations are about AI. SRI created one of the first AI labs in the world, and our work remains very relevant, particularly because we have many projects focused on fixing things that are breaking in our current AI moment. We’re working to make AI more explainable. We’re working on ways to make AI more resource-efficient. Getting some of those new tools and platforms into our clients’ hands is really important.
“It’s an opportunity for companies to engage deeply with Silicon Valley, understand how it works, and also add back and contribute to where Silicon Valley is going.” — Chris Cowart
And then there’s the confluence between AI and biology, from synthetic biology to diagnosis. How can we use AI to create new therapies at lower costs with more scale and more accessibility?
Many of our clients also continue to be focused on climate solutions, for example using technologies to lower their cost of goods or pursuing new methods of carbon capture. Our recent work on carbon capture plays into that interest.
For you, what’s been most exciting about building new bridges between the Japanese and Silicon Valley innovation ecosystems?
In the 1990s, you saw these buses start to arrive in downtown Palo Alto. It was people from all around the world meeting venture capitalists or going to see what was happening at IDEO or trying to understand these startups like Google. Some companies even set up an office. But these efforts often didn’t have lasting power. Companies would explore Silicon Valley, and then if it didn’t stick in a year or two, they would move on. It was innovation tourism.
The goal here was to create a lasting open innovation launch pad and center that will allow participating companies to build the right relationships — the kind that will pay off over the long term. It’s an opportunity for companies to engage deeply with Silicon Valley, understand how it works, and also add back and contribute to where Silicon Valley is going.
Learn more about the Nomura-SRI Innovation Center or contact us.
