Immersiveness

My criteria for judging work is whether or not I am getting an intense experience on the business frontline and am immersed in my job. I joined RENOVA hoping I might be able to tackle business head-on and start up a business from scratch, and I said this in my interview. I was told straight-up by RENOVA’s management this was possible in RENOVA’s working environment and when I joined, I found this to be true.

Several years after joining, I was involved in environmental consulting projects in Japan and Southeast Asia. After that, a team made up of three members including myself was formed to take charge of developing big, new biomass power generation projects. It was a crash course in setting up a new business, going around Japan with a map in hand looking for potential locations, studying technology, being looked after by people in the local communities, and coming up with a scheme that RENOVA had no experience of at all from scratch.
In particular, while fuel procurement is important, there was no established procurement method partly because it was a crossover period at the time, and we groped our way blindly to arrive at a long-term procurement scheme, contract terms and conditions, a quality framework, and project financing. Various things happened, but starting from nothing, we gradually built the business, gaining more colleagues, and the number of power plants in operation or under construction across Japan increased to seven. I got a kick out of this process and was completely immersed in it.