Inside NTT Research’s push to commercialize deep tech

With its new ‘NTT Research 2.0’ strategy, the lab is trying to translate long-term scientific bets into viable companies without sacrificing the research itself.

[Source illustration: Adobe Stock]

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps.

Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline now under strain as AI compresses development........

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