Sustainable Management
Balancing Social Value with Economic Value: Actions
Seeds of social value
Disseminating sustainability within the organization
Experiments in Mirai Yokoku
Mirai Yokoku 2025
Case study
A Solution for Organizational Growth: Maximizing Human Capital, Building Autonomous Teams
We have defined our social role as that of a work and lifestyle company. This means that we now transcend our traditional categories of furniture and stationery and expand the reach of our business fields.
Our fourth medium-term plan, Unite for Growth 2027, commits us to creating synergies between our existing businesses. As part of this, we have developed a solution that drives organizational growth by maximizing individual and organizational performance. That is, as well as focusing on the hard side, namely, optimizing physical office spaces, it focuses on the soft side, namely, expediting a human-capital-centered leadership and improving employee engagement.
We unveiled this solution in April 2025, naming it Teamus. Teamus is a business support service that combines KOKUYO Group’s accumulated insights from workstyle research with the client’s own best practices for organizational reform.
First, the team in question is surveyed using our original questionnaire tool and the results are then graphically presented to represent the team’s status. Next, Teamus delivers an intervention consisting of dialogue and coaching to facilitate mutual understanding between team members and encourage behavioral change. This intervention encourages both autonomous growth as individuals and teamwork.
In fiscal 2025, we enlisted a dedicated organization to develop a fully fledged support structure for Teamus, drawing on the customer touchpoints and track record in spatial design cultivated in our existing businesses. By the end of the year, Teamus had begun delivering services to a wide range of companies.
This case study empirically illustrates how we are creating both social and economic value: By assisting each team in its own efforts to transition into a more autonomous organization, we are helping the clients improve employee wellbeing and organizational productivity.
- Yuimori: Sustainable wooden furniture as part of a practical initiative promoting recycling of community resources*
- Pilot scheme with the Toda-city Board of Education: Supporting a new form of study (student-led, problem-solving based)*
- Utsuho Academy: A project to recycle melamine-coated wooden desks*
- ChopValue Manufacturing Japan: A joint project to recycle disposable wooden chopsticks into office furniture*
- Launch of digital transformation services for admin: Using our business-process knowhow to ease the stress in digitally transforming admin operations*
- Clearnote and Carry Campus in collaboration with Manabi-aid Co., Ltd.: A digital study tool (videographic lessons) to aid learning in in-between moments*
- Dig: A talent-development facility for discovering employee knowledge and for sharing accumulated tacit knowledge and passion across the organization*
- Collaborative project between logistics, industry, and academia: Making logistics more sustainable and preparing the next generation of logistics workers*
- Campus: A notebook series rebranded as a learning-style partner to channel young people’s creativity*
- A project to rebrand KOKUYO as a whole under the theme of curiosity to contribute to a self-directed collaborative society*
- Office Agentic AI: An AI-driven workstyle support service that streamlines thinking to stimulate creativity*
- Manabikata Lab: Researching people’s learning styles to redefine the value we offer*
Mirai Yokoku 2024
Case study
A Project to Make Buildings Profitable Again (Increasing the Value of Vacant Buildings)
Our fourth medium-term plan, Unite for Growth 2027, commits us to increasing the value of spaces by applying our expertise in delivering value in furniture, fixtures, equipment, and interior design for offices.
Increasing the value of spaces means interior renovation work that incorporates the functions people demand and that ensures that the space is commercially viable.
An example of increasing the value of spaces is Creative Lounge Mov, a members-only co-working lounge that opened in Shibuya Hikarie in 2012. Another example is The Campus Flats Togoshi. Opened in 2023 in the Togoshi area of Tokyo, The Campus Flats Togoshi is an apartment building that once served as a company dorm. We renovated the building, converting it into a co-living space.
Drawing on the spatial design expertise we developed in our existing businesses, we established the Asset-Value-Up Office to meet emerging demand related to spatial assets. For example, we anticipate a growing demand for addressing the problem of vacant office space in small- and medium-sized office buildings. We also expect that the rising cost of constructing office buildings will drive demand for increasing the value of office space in existing office buildings. In March 2025, we took the first step in this new business by acquiring a vacant office building in the Kuramae district of Taito-ku, Tokyo.
We will build our track record in increasing the value of spaces by engaging in real-estate planning for investment, engaging in architectural renovation, and creating a model for managing the property once it enters service. In this way, we will expand the reach of our field into real-estate renovation.
Right: Creative Lounge Mov
- Loopla: A project to re-use recyclable, sustainable materials in office furniture*
- Collaboration between Yokoku Research and Kyoto University: Enhancing wellbeing in the workplace*
- Pandoor: A service for people working multiple jobs whereby companies and workers seeking growth opportunities are matched with companies seeking solutions for business challenges*
- Using the “Hello! Family.” tool to test out ideas for empowering people with disabilities *
- Reopening of The Campus: A testing ground for post-pandemic workstyles*
- How We Live (a global lifestyle brand): Kokuyo and Actus’s collaboration for work-life integration*
- Culture Snack: A culture festival for revitalizing local communities*
- Piloting the re-use of acrylic panels: A collaboration with Sumitomo Chemical Company*
- Paper packaging with on-pack QR code for accessing multilingual and audio product information*
- Harakado: A community factory for creating new value in household goods*
Mirai Yokoku 2023
- “Hello! Family.”: An IoT-driven child-monitoring tool that stimulates new parent-child conversations*
- The Campus Flats Togoshi: A residential complex for prototyping lifestyle ideas*
- Sauna Bu: A new lifestyle brand from Kokuyo’s sauna club*
- Study With Campus: A self-study space for students in junior-high and high schools*
- Sutenai Circle and Hows Design: Supporting a circular economy and using inclusive design to promote wellbeing among the public*
- “Tsunage Loopa!”: Learning about the environment through a practical experience in recycling notebooks*
- Kokuyo Haku Shanghai 2023: A summer life-themed event in China conjuring up memories of summer days during one’s student years*
- Pop-up shops in Thailand and Malaysia featuring Kokuyo stationery*
- KokuyoDoors: A try-out shop where people can discover how great Japanese stationery is*
- Another Store: Delivering futuristic customer experiences in a real-life store space*
- Campus for Schools: Adjustable school desks and chairs optimized for GIGA schools*
- Kokuyo Digital Academy: A program for cultivating a digitally savvy workforce through education and practice*
- Core: A hall for open communication, maximizing the value of in-person gatherings*
- Baton no Yokoku: Developing unique, creative solutions to the problems faced by communities*
- Sustainable Academia Weeks: An event to raise sustainability awareness among all employees*
Mirai Yokoku 2022
- Carry Campus: A study app for junior-high and high school students*
- Zaitaku Hyakka: Web media for working at home*
- The Campus hosts future-school festival by Kamiyama Marugoto College of Design, Technology, and Entrepreneurship*
- Wellness program One Tap Sports for Biz launched with Euphoria*
- Kokuyo trials oVice, a new kind of virtual sensory space*
- "Kokuyo Open Lab.”: Combining spaces with digital transformation to experiment with new workstyles*
- Kaunet Loopa Paper Resource Recycling Service*
- *Japanese Only
Sustainable Academia: Disseminating Sustainability within the Organization
Event: Rescue KOKUYO from Sustainability Complacency
We held a fun learning event to inform employees about the actions we have taken on material issues, our current progress in sustainability, and what our corporate sustainability goals are. The event, titled Rescue KOKUYO from Sustainability Complacency, was held at three venues in Tokyo and Osaka.
Attendee satisfaction rate reached 99.2%, higher than in events of previous years. The event proved an eye-opener for attendees who had previously felt distanced from the sustainability agenda.
At the event, attendees designed a booklet featuring a rescue-themed board game. The booklets have been posted to group companies and other business locations to spread the sustainability message to more employees.
Story for the board game:
Overhearing an employee’s insensitive remark at a sustainability expo, you begin to wonder: Is KOKUYO becoming complacent about sustainability!?
A dark future awaits such an organization: The organization stops offering paid leave and becomes environmentally unfriendly. It then loses the confidence of its shareholders.
Solve the material issue puzzle to save KOKUYO from this fate.
Email Magazine Sustainable Academia News
Our email magazine Sustainable Academia News includes articles about our actions on material issue and trailblazing initiatives for balancing social value with economic value.
It is published every month or so for KOKUYO Group employees in Japan.
▽Topics in previous volumes
| Volume | Topics |
|---|---|
| Vol.1 | What exactly is an integrated report?／What exactly is a logic model? |
| Vol.2 | What exactly is sustainable business management?／The environmental and social landscape around KOKUYO |
| Vol.3 | What exactly are impact KPIs?／Examples of balancing social value with economic value: Saxa |
| Vol.4 | Questionnaire survey on attitudes toward sustainability／Examples of balancing social value with economic value: Melamine veneer |
| Vol.5 | Event announcement from Sustainable Academia／Examples of balancing social value with economic value: Mineral water |
| Vol.6 | What does it mean to coexist with nature?／Report on Sustainable Academia event |
| Vol.7 | Examples of coexisting with nature／Introducing Well-Station |
Sustainable Lab: Encouraging Action
Sustainable Lab is a platform for employees to develop and implement their own plans towards solving the KOKUYO Group’s material issues.
During 2025, a total of nine teams throughout the group challenged themselves to find solutions in areas such as improving wellbeing and contributing toward a circular economy, and shared their results.
This provided a forum for employees to take ownership of and rethink familiar issues and for related parts of our business to benefit from new insights into issue resolution.
Sustainable Lab participants present their work