This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
The following is a text archive of key points from the CHANGE by ONE JAPAN application support session held on May 31. The session featured Ito Yoichi and Asou Yoichi in a conversation about their formative experiences and their frameworks for helping corporate employees develop the conviction needed to pursue new businesses. This report was originally written by a participant from ONE X.
"Drawing Out Non-Negotiable Convictions" — Ito Yoichi
The Core Message: Change and Then Challenge
Ito's central message was direct: change first, then challenge. Taking that first step will sometimes mean failing. But as you keep moving, you find new friends, build a network, and discover that the environment around you changes as a result.
The world is changing rapidly, and the digital era is accelerating that pace. During the COVID period, when educators came to him asking how to teach remotely, Ito proposed a seminar on remote teaching methods — and within five days of the idea, 1,000 people had registered to attend. The internet connects everything and compresses the time between idea and action.
The implication he drew: increasingly, we are moving into a world where the relevant skill is not executing someone else's defined tasks but asking your own questions, having real conversations about them, making your own decisions, and building something as a result.
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"Does a Corporate Intrapreneur Need WILL?" — Asou Yoichi
New Business Is Not a Special Talent
Asou's opening position: new business creation is not a rare skill. Anyone can do it. Every salaried employee can develop into a corporate intrapreneur. Consider how sales works — business card exchange, appointment setting, proposal, negotiation, closing. Each of those is a learnable step. New business development has its own version of those steps, and if you follow them correctly, you can learn to execute them.
What New Business Development Does Not Require
What most people believe is necessary for new business development, Asou said, is almost entirely unnecessary:
- Validation case studies
- Survey reports
- Social proof documents
- Approval from internal seniors or competitors
None of these matter in the early stages. What matters is the core cycle: take a hypothesis to customers; modify the hypothesis based on what customers actually say; repeat. Concentrating on this cycle and only this cycle is the operating model for early-stage new business development.
He added a specific warning: do not do the things that belong to later stages in the early stages. The sequencing is as important as the activities themselves.
WILL Is Cultivated, Not Discovered
This is where Asou challenged the most common advice given to aspiring intrapreneurs. Many programs tell people to "find their WILL" — their vision, their purpose, their non-negotiable conviction. Asou's view: that framing is wrong, and it creates unnecessary anxiety.
WILL is not something you find already formed inside yourself. It is something you grow over time. The starting point can be a small interest, a mild curiosity, a passing sense of "that seems like a problem worth solving." That is enough to begin.
The process:
- Start with a small interest
- Go to where the problem actually exists — the field, the real customers
- Tell someone about what you observed and felt
- Repeat this cycle
As you cycle through this process, the small initial interest grows into something larger and more defined. The conversation step is critical — speaking aloud to others about what you observed forces you to articulate it, and articulation accelerates development. Asou: "If you've talked to about 15 people about it, someone will usually come to you with a related idea or connection." The social dynamic of sharing interest creates its own momentum.
The version of "thinking" that happens entirely in one's head, without being shared, is usually not thinking — it is worrying. Speaking transforms it.
Advice from the Q&A
When asked about the early stages of customer discovery — when to broaden versus deepen — Asou said: in the earliest phase, do not worry about which specific customer segment to target. Go broadly first. Once a pattern starts emerging about who is most resonant with the problem you're working on, narrow to that segment and increase the cycle speed there.
At the very beginning, the only action is talking. Not writing plans, not building decks, not getting approval. Just talking to people.
Panel Discussion: Making Convictions Real Inside a Company
How the Panelists Approach Listening in New Business Consultations
Ito: "I just give minimal responses and let the person talk as much as possible. I don't give them the answer."
Asou: "Most consultations that come to me as 'a dilemma' are not actually dilemmas. There's really only one answer: just do it."
Panel Highlights
Why Asou founded AlphaDrive: While running Recruit's internal entrepreneurship program, he watched the company go through an IPO and start developing the symptoms of a large company — slower decisions, more political complexity, more distance from customers. In the middle of that period, his job was to ignite people and get them working on new businesses. He watched person after person transform — their eyes would change — as they stood in front of real social problems and real customers. Witnessing that transformation repeatedly was the experience that made him want to build AlphaDrive and make it his full-time work. He is now past the WILL phase and focused entirely on scaling what he has already built.
Why Ito launched the Entrepreneurship Faculty at Musashino University: The primary motivation was to contribute to Japan's vitality. In his 20s, he had significant personal struggles, but later found at Yahoo a culture that described itself as "free, flat, and fun" — and recognized that environment as something worth building toward for others.
From CHANGE second-term participant Tanaka-san: "I realized we could change things ourselves. I realized that even without formal authority, we could change the world." Tanaka continues to work at Maruko, and his answer for why CHANGE was worth participating in: "Because you become capable of solving problems from scratch, entirely through your own efforts."
Final Words for Prospective Applicants
Asou: "Submit a blank application if you need to." (Laughs.) Then, seriously: "The real secret is to do 20 customer interviews before you write the application. Not 20 structured conversations — just 20 conversations. If you do that, you will pass. Three interviews will often be enough. It's the only thing that matters."
Ito: "If you can't do it, you can stop partway through. There's no fee. The question I'm asking you is: what do you actually want to do?"
CHANGE Secretary Hamamoto: "Looking back at my own career, I am nothing but grateful to Asou-san and Ito-san. Through events like this, I want everyone here to take one step forward the way I did."
Second-term finalist Tanaka-san: "If you're hesitating, absolutely do it."
Reflection
The core takeaway from this session: new business is executable by anyone who follows the right sequence, focuses on the hypothesis-customer cycle, and understands that WILL is grown through action rather than introspection. The people who say they want to but don't are usually caught between two incompatible metrics — the desire for change and the desire for stability — without a framework for resolving that tension.
One step leads to the next. CHANGE provides the environment. The only question is whether you want to step in.
This event report was produced by TIMEWELL.
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