Intellectual Property Initiatives

The Daicel Group respects intellectual property rights held by third parties and recognizes its own intellectual property - including patents, utility models, trademarks, and designs - as critical corporate assets. We are committed to protecting and maintaining these assets appropriately.

Guided by our basic philosophy of making lives better by value co-creation, the Daicel Group invests in intellectual property and other intangible assets to sustain long-term value creation.
We actively collaborate with partners across industries to address evolving social needs and deliver new values.

The Intellectual Property Center operates through cross-functional IP activity teams composed of members from:

These teams manage intellectual property strategically throughout the business lifecycle, including invention evaluation, filing decisions, portfolio management, utilization, and risk mitigation involving third-party rights.
By "Creating" and "Leveraging" intellectual properties, we support our monozukuri, and by "Integrating" intellectual property, - leveraging it through co-creation and collaboration with external partners - we promote innovations that lead to new business creation, enhance Daicel's brand power, and bolster business of the Daicel Group. We will strengthen intellectual property activities as one of the means to accelerate Daicel's "Accelerate 2030" Mid-term Management Strategy.​
Through this structure, intellectual property is positioned not merely as a legal function, but as a key driver of business strategy and innovation.

At Daicel, patent analysis and verification are systematically integrated into business processes through our proprietary system, PACS (Patent Analysis and Confirmation System).
This system enables us to conduct thorough patent analysis and clearance at each stage of new business development and product development. Through this process, we ensure that our technologies do not infringe any valid third-party intellectual property rights, while promoting efficient and reliable advancement of new technologies that drive the Daicel  Group’s growth.

The Intellectual Property Center goes beyond conventional filing and rights acquisition activities. With a global and forward-looking perspective, we actively leverage intellectual property to enhance competitive advantage, secure core technologies, and accelerate new business creation.
Through these “Offensive” IP initiatives, we position intellectual property as a strategic driver of business growth.

In the area of new business creation, we implement IP landscape analysis by integrating and visualizing diverse data, including intellectual property data and market information. This enables us to analyze and anticipate key processes and core technologies essential for business creation.
Based on these insights, we identify priority areas for resource allocation, select promising new business opportunities, and develop innovative business models—thereby accelerating innovation across our company.

Daicel promotes the use of IP landscape as a “strategic compass” for management, business, and research.
By integrating diverse information sources - including patents, technological trends, academic research, market data, and competitive intelligence - we gain a comprehensive understanding of our business environment. This enables informed decision-making and supports the identification of growth opportunities and risks.

We view IPL as "Strategic Compass” for management, business, and research and utilize it in exploring business opportunities and supporting key management decisions.
IP landscape activities are conducted in close collaboration with relevant business and R&D teams, ensuring that insights are directly linked to strategic execution and contributes to strengthening our competitiveness in key focus areas such as the environment, healthcare, and high-performance materials. We are making efforts every day so that our IPL can help open doors to the future of Daicel.

To strengthen IP capabilities across the organization, the Intellectual Property Center works in collaboration with the HR function to deliver structured training programs, including:
​

Through these initiatives, we promote a company-wide culture that values intellectual property as a source of competitive advantage.

The Daicel Group contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by registering its environmentally related technologies on WIPO GREEN, a global platform for environmental technology exchange operated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations.
Since April 2020, the Daicel Group has participated in WIPO GREEN as a partner, actively supporting global efforts to address environmental challenges through the effective utilization of intellectual property.
Our initiatives have also been introduced on the Japan Patent Office website.

A method for measuring display glare^※, jointly developed with Komatsu NTC Ltd., was established as a Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) under the title “Determination of magnitude of display sparkle” (JIS C 1006) on December 20, 2019. 
The method and apparatus for quantitatively measuring glare are patented as “Equipment and Method of Determining Sparkle” (Patent No. 6294904). With respect to this patented technology, we have made a RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) commitment, under which the technology is licensed on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.

In 2018, Daicel received the Commissioner of the Patent Office Awards at the "Intellectual Property Achievement Awards" organized by the Japan Patent Office of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which recognizes individuals and companies that have contributed to the development of Japan's intellectual property rights system.

The award recognized that [1] business, research & development, and intellectual property divisions are working together, [2] the optical resolution device (chiral separation) for pharmaceutical development, which was commercialized through industry-academia collaboration, enjoys the largest share of the business market thanks to the use of related intellectual properties, and [3] Daicel is helping to improve the productivity of domestic industries and strengthen their international competitiveness by licensing the "Intellectual Integrated Production System" called the "Daicel Way."

In 2018, Daicel received the 15th Industrial Achievement Award from the Intellectual Property Association of Japan, which honors corporations for their outstanding achievements in intellectual property activities.

The award recognizes Daicel's efforts to promote collaboration among business, R&D, and intellectual property divisions, and for proposing this model to industry. Among others, the model was highly evaluated because it can be applied regardless of company size and it also has the potential to be applied in industry-academia collaboration.

Daicel has been awarded Local Commendations for Invention by the Japan Institute of Invention and Innovation for four straight years since 2017.