Takashi Nishikawa

Bio

Takashi Nishikawa is the Vice President of Panasonic Ventures, L.L.C. and a founding team member and Managing Director of Conductive Ventures. With a long career at Panasonic in Japan along with his extensive experiences in Silicon Valley, Takashi discovers new ways startups can effectively collaborate and engage with Panasonic and its key partners. Takashi joined Panasonic in 1992 and worked on the compound semiconductor material and device development. After working on power transistors for some of the earliest cellular phones, he began product development of short wavelength laser diodes for Blu-ray. While developing technology for Blu-ray, Takashi received his first experience with outside technology disruption with the emergence of (gallium nitride) GaN, which caused the shutdown of his internal project. Eventually, he transitioned his career as a product engineer to R&D strategy and planning. Through his experiences developing long-term roadmaps, he soon discovered that incremental improvements in technology were quickly being disrupted by Silicon Valley startups. The traditional role of R&D in a large corporation changed quickly as new dominant platforms emerged. Traditional roadmaps were unable to accurately predict the speed and scale of new platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Having been disrupted both as a product engineer and R&D strategy planner, Takashi decided to leverage his experiences by identifying and scouting new technologies in Silicon Valley beginning in 2008. He focused on promoting strategic collaboration between startups and Panasonic R&D. He continued this work when he returned back to Japan in 2012. Takashi earned a M.S. in Material Engineering and has a background in Chemistry and Solid-state Physics from the Tokyo Institute of Technology.