This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
Work Is Entering the Gradient Era
At ONE X, we've been running two parallel initiatives around side and concurrent work.
Furusato Kengyo is a platform that connects regional businesses with professionals from large companies, supporting them with business digitalization, digital marketing, and product development. The initiative has been covered by major newspaper outlets in Japan.
Shiojiri CxO Lab is a high-tier side-work initiative that sends private-sector professional talent (designated CxO talent) to work on regional challenges in Shiojiri City, Nagano. The goal is to both solve local problems and expand the city's community of engaged outsiders. In the past year alone, this initiative won a double award at the Work Story Award, one of Japan's most recognized honors for work practices.
After two years running both initiatives, one key insight emerged.
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The Engagement Cycle—And Why Most Regional Programs Fail
Most regional revitalization programs start with "face the region's challenges." The majority fail. The reason: they ignore how human behavior actually changes.
People don't become deeply committed to a cause by being asked to care about it first. They become committed by doing something they already love—and discovering, through that, that they care about the place and the people.
At Shiojiri CxO Lab, we redesigned the process: start by understanding participants' individual interests and passions, then find side-project opportunities within the regional context that connect to those interests. Build "likingness" and relationship first, then approach the problems. The result was a measurable increase in people who seriously engaged—and in the number who proposed and implemented their own solutions.
A Gradient of Engagement
The key design principle is that people's level of commitment should be able to vary, and should be honored at every level. The model we developed for the Shiojiri ecosystem includes:
- Community participants (light engagement)
- Project participants (project-based work)
- Side-work recipients (paid, defined scope)
- Honorary CxO (advisory relationship)
- Designated CxO (deeper operational involvement)
- Full-time transition (for those who want it)
Rather than trying to convert everyone to deep commitment, you create a structure where each level of involvement is legitimate—and people can increase their commitment over time as the relationship deepens.
This model applies to private companies and central government ministries as well.
What This Means for Companies
We are increasingly receiving inquiries from companies who don't just want to send their employees on side projects—they want to receive outside professionals into their own organization.
"We want to bring in side-project talent, but we don't know how to structure the engagement."
This is exactly the challenge we've built tools to address. JOB HASH, our beta corporate platform, is designed to solve this. The goal is to make assigning work across organizational boundaries as smooth as buying a product on e-commerce—connecting companies with the external talent they need for specific projects without the friction of traditional hiring.
The Coming Model: Co-Creation at Scale
The shift from "employment" to "project" is already underway. Tesla, NIO, GitHub, Shopify—all of these companies have communities of users and contributors who co-create the product. The most successful version of regional co-creation, and of corporate community-building, will follow the same logic: participants care because they're genuinely involved, not because they've been asked to care.
We want the Shiojiri model and Furusato Kengyo to become pilot cases that can be adapted and applied across many different organizations.
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