This past January, OMRON established an "R&D Home Page" on its corporate website (Japanese: http://www.omron.co.jp; English: http://www.omron.com), to provide comprehensive information regarding OMRON technologies in hopes of attracting opportunities for outside partnerships. This page introduces still unreleased OMRON technologies, as well as provides information on technical details, patent acquisitions, essays and technical papers. Readers interested in specific technologies will be able to contact the OMRON Alliance Desk directly through the home page.

Through this effort, OMRON hopes to advance its R&D Global Alliance Partner Strategy, in which the company will actively pursue outside partnerships to not only advance its own technologies, but to also acquire new technologies. This new technology strategy aims to bring about the following three points:

1. Establishment of a global "Virtual Research Center"

   By releasing information regarding its technologies over the Internet, OMRON can attract not only domestic companies, but also overseas venture companies to build alliances on a global scale. This will establish a "Virtual Research Center" through which OMRON will be able to develop the most advanced technologies at the most ideal locations, anywhere in the world.

2. Selection and focus of development topics

   By releasing information regarding R&D topics to the public, OMRON can receive valuable objective evaluations from qualified outside sources. This will help eliminate inner-directed thinking, and strengthen the principle of competition in OMRON´s R&D efforts.

3. Strengthening core technologies and acquiring new applied technologies

   By carefully selecting alliance partners, OMRON will receive expert cooperation in strengthening its own core "Information Sensing" technologies, and also obtain new applied technologies provided by these alliance partners.

It is OMRON´s belief that if it did not provide such information to the public, the company would not effectively receive vital feedback regarding such important elements as market needs, stakeholder evaluations, and the affects of these elements on OMRON. Therefore, by proactively sharing information via the Internet, OMRON hopes to first receive this feedback, and with it, further focus its R&D efforts to enable the company to proceed with developing solid alliances.

URL for the R&D Home Page:

Japan Domestic (Japanese): http://www.omron.co.jp/r_d/index.html

Global (English): http://www.omron.com/r_d/index.html

(The Global R&D Home Page is scheduled to be released at the end of January, 2000.)