Shingo Yasuda, also known as Nakamura, is visiting the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM) for the fourth time. The professor of Business Administration at Ritsumeikan University in Osaka is teaching and studying for a semester in the Department of Business. He is exchanging ideas with Prof. Dr. Nils Madeja about the digitalization and digital transformation of companies – and plans to examine a German "classic": the deposit on single-use beverage containers.
Buy a plastic bottle, drink it, insert it into a machine – and get your deposit back. It took several years for the deposit return system for single-use beverage containers to run so smoothly. Political and technical hurdles had to be overcome, but today it's part of everyday life in supermarkets and beverage stores. And it's gaining recognition as a contribution to solving the global plastic waste crisis: "I'm interested in the deposit return system, how the different types of plastic are separated, and what economic factors determine this form of circular economy," says Prof. Nakamura.
He wants to take some ideas back to Japan, particularly regarding sustainability and the digitalization of business processes. He also plans to attend some lectures at THM . At the same time, he wants to share Japanese approaches to the latter – mutual learning from different perspectives on the same economic issues.
To mark the start of his research semester, Nakamura was welcomed by THMVice President Prof. Olaf Berger, as well as Prof. Dr. Gerrit Sames and Prof. Dr. Jens Klose, Dean and Vice Dean of the Department of Business. Sames expressed his pleasure that Nakamura was visiting THM repeatedly: from 2017 to 2019, he made short delegation trips to Giessen annually. In 2020, a delegation from the Department of Business had planned to visit him for the first time – a visit that was thwarted by the pandemic. This was Nakamura's fourth visit. Prof. Sames gave him a detailed presentation about THM , outlining the research and teaching priorities of the THM Business School.
“We have a long-standing collaboration. I am very pleased to have him here at the Department as a guest for a full semester,” explains Madeja, who will be Nakamura’s primary contact. His stay and his planned research project at the intersection of digital transformation and sustainability offer numerous opportunities for further collaboration. “Our research and teaching in the field of Digital Business will certainly benefit from this,” says Madeja, who is also the head of the Digital Business Master’s program. Nakamura will not be exclusively at THM : He plans to visit companies in the region to gain insights into the German economy. Despite cultural differences, the business structure of Central Hesse and the region around Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe exhibits clear parallels, reports Nils Madeja: Both regions are characterized by a strong focus on medium-sized businesses, complemented by companies from the heavy industry sector.