Masanobu Katoh
President | Xinova Japan
Ever since I was an elementary school student, I loved science and machinery. My first piece of machinery was a crystal radio set, but I quickly advanced to a vacuum tube stereo amplifier and became an amateur radio operator. As a high school student, I began to play with computer hardware, and built my own logic circuit. While I was in high school, I initially thought I would become a scientist, but among my classmates were people who were extremely talented mathematicians and physicists, so I realized I needed to take a different path. So at university in Japan, I majored in law, and went to a law school in the U.S., but I continued to tinker with electronics. While attending law classes during the day, I was attending night school to learn about computer software programs like ASSEMBLER, COBOL, and FORTRAN. The 1970s was a time when the IBM 360 system was a popular mainframe computer, so studying software at that time was extremely unusual.
I spent much of my career at a large international Japanese company that specialized in computers and networking, and I ended up spending 17 years living in the U.S. Since the 1990s, I spent much of my career focused on the growth of the internet, and the digital economy as a whole. But something like the digital economy isn’t really an effort that can be self-sustaining , so I went into security, privacy, intellectual property, and many other policy issues and ended up writing books and papers as well as drafting several bills that became laws. At this time, I was also the first member of the board representing Asia-Pacific for ICANN（Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Through these activities, I was fortunate to work with many of the founders of what have now become globally leading IT companies.
Currently at Xinova, I help give birth to new technologies and find the best possible homes for these breakthroughs that I hope will make an impact on society. Even after all these years, I still have that same childhood curiosity about cutting edge technology, but I always seem to get pulled in to meeting and trying to analyze inventions and encourage new ideas from our network. Although I am not an engineer myself, I see myself as an “originator of new innovations.”