Dr. Takahisa Karita, Co-Founder, CFO, Uniplat
The path to success in an entrepreneurial journey is never a joyride. Right from the seeds of the idea being sown to bringing it to fruition, there will be hurdles all the way and it is very easy to succumb to failure. There comes times when things don’t go as planned and you fall flat on your face. But, the ability to dust yourself off, pick up the pieces and move on bringing what you learned from the experience is what separates a true entrepreneur from the rest. A real entrepreneur is a go-getter, who is steadfast come rain, hail, or shine. While most of us struggle to punch back when life throws a left hook, such resilient entrepreneurs not only survive but prosper in the face of adversity while carving the path to success with chisels of determination, creativity, and leadership. In our quest to find such resilient leaders for our upcoming edition at APAC Entrepreneur, we came across the success story of one such prominent leader, Dr. Takahisa Karita.
At the age of 28, Dr. Karita raised funds and established a bio-venture company in Japan based on his father’s research and development. But, due to the Lehman shock in 2008, he sold the company. While it was very tough for him to sustain those turbulent times, he never gave up hope and made use of his management experience to support various companies. Fortunately, one of those companies, an educational software development company in China, grew steadily and introduced the system to more than 5,000 educational institutions in mainland China. This experience motivated him to lay the foundation of Unify Platform AG to support entrepreneurs and researchers. Prior to this, he also worked as a corporate officer in Chemiteras Inc. Japan, a biotechnology venture company that researches and develops drug candidates for brain disorders.
The World’s First Open Platform for Entrepreneurial Researchers
In order to support Chemiteras Inc., when Dr. Karita was planning to create an advisory board team and a platform where they could disseminate business and technology information, he came up with the idea of a platform that isn’t exclusive to the company but available to everyone. He sensed the need for a platform that can support not only the company but also many like-minded entrepreneurs around the world. Furthermore, since there are already many online support platforms for the medical field such as ResearchGate, he decided to build an open platform “UNIPLAT” that is specifically designed to help researchers and entrepreneurs around the world get more exposure and connect with others who want to contribute to the improvement of global research and humanitarian project.
According to Dr. Karita, the biggest task for researchers and entrepreneurs in continuing their research and running their businesses are financing, market expansion, and meeting the right mentors. Thus, to address their demands and seamlessly keep up with supporters on a global scale, supporters should appropriately evaluate their skills, businesses, and intellectual property (IP) with confidence, regardless of their economic and geographical circumstances. On the other hand, to receive support, he emphasizes that researchers and entrepreneurs must have schemes to prevent unauthorized secondary use and imitation of their intellectual property rights before public registration of know-how and ideas. “Many entrepreneurs and researchers are afraid to disclose information worldwide because of these concerns. Hence, we provide credit rating, NFT (Non-Fungible Token) based Pre-IP and simultaneous translation live-streaming in 9 countries to solve such problems,” affirms Dr. Karita.
Conquering Challenges along the Way
Every successful business leader goes through trying times. But how they respond to these obstacles is what sets them apart. For Dr. Karita, the biggest challenge was to get researchers, entrepreneurs, and supporters from all over the world to join the platform. “Currently, inclusion and diversity are being advocated, but there are still very few private platforms in the world that can fairly evaluate entrepreneurs and researchers around the world,” elucidates Dr. Karita. The UNIPLAT members’ political, economic, geographical, cultural, and religious situations are all diverse. Thus, it aims to create its own frameworks, UIUX, and service structures to satiate the needs of all members. “My challenge has not been fully completed yet, but since it opened in October 2021, as of July 2022, the members from 104 countries have participated in UNIPLAT, adds Dr. Karita.
For the avid entrepreneur, a good leader is someone who can always consider a balanced way to improve the world. With today’s societies and economies becoming more complex and diversified, satisfying all stakeholders and making all happy is no easy feat. However, he believes that it is critical for leaders to balance the happiness of all stakeholders.
Continues Adding More Value in the Years Ahead
Every leader has a unique definition of success. For Dr. Karita, success is to see entrepreneurs and researchers all over the world using UNIPLAT beyond various circumstances. With UNIPLAT, he aspires to offer a platform where entrepreneurs and researchers will be evaluated and supported by supporters fairly regardless of race, gender, religion, or social circumstances. “Most importantly, I think that finding collaborators and mentors (for R&D fundraising, market development, and so on) is the first step in management for entrepreneurs and researchers. For that, we must improve our platform every day to make it even more attractive,” opines Dr. Karita.
Forging ahead, the business leader aspires to continue building UNIPLAT into a more systematic, serviceable, and legally robust platform, and invite more globally influential human resources as an advisory board. In addition, he also intends to increase the major companies that want to support entrepreneurs and researchers, the stakeholders, and HNWI in UNIPLAT and develop business alliances with the major entrepreneur support platforms that exist all over the world, such as the Group of Nations, EUTECH, ACIC-KL, Sparkinov, etc. “From this winter, we plan to promote participation in Uniplat by university and research institutes, which are a treasure trove of potential entrepreneurs. In the spring of 2023, we also plan to issue UNIPLAT’s own cryptocurrency and grant donation tokens to Uniplat entrepreneur and researcher members,” concludes Dr. Karita.