RIKEN's management provides the leadership, direction and oversight necessary to maximize the potential of a fast-moving organization with thousands of scientists working in a wide array of research fields. For details on RIKEN's organizational structure, please see this page with detailed PDFs.

RIKEN’s Vision on the 2030 Horizon

RIKEN, Japan's premier scientific research institute, seeks to be a place where scientists conduct the research that they themselves wish to pursue, research that coincides with the creation of knowledge needed to secure humanity's future, a place where science and society converge and deepen mutual trust. For over a century, RIKEN researchers have faithfully handed down this tradition and made this "RIKEN Spirit" a reality embodying the vision described below.

1. Mission

To bring science to the Japanese people and to humanity as a whole, to create their tomorrows through honest dialogue with the people whose values they embody as a national research and development agency.

This entails:
Creating Knowledge, the fruit of RIKEN’s efforts to promote global affluence and civilization’s continuing development.
Ensuring constructive interactions between the fields that researchers themselves wish to investigate in depth, and fields where advancement of learning is critical to our future.
Deepening mutual trust between Science and Society so that both broaden their horizons.
Contributing to Society through the innovative fusion of cybernetics and the physical sciences.
Promoting research compatible with an increasingly inclusive and sustainable global society.

2. Organization and action

To bring together broad areas of global cutting-edge science and technology engaging the world's most prominent researchers and engineers, without fear of remaking the organizations where they work, identifying the tasks that only RIKEN can tackle, putting into practice the investigations that only RIKEN can undertake.

This entails:
Maximizing the effective use of the most advanced basic science and technology platforms and research resources through organic links among them.
Clearly identifying the fields of advanced research that only RIKEN can, and must, undertake.
Establishing multidisciplinary collaborations, as only RIKEN can, to accelerate advances in and surmount barriers across existing fields of scientific endeavor.
Facilitating understanding, at the highest level of knowledge, by uniting, at their roots, the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences.

3. Orientation

To assemble and orchestrate RIKEN's strengths, achievements, and tradition in order to bring science to new heights and pioneer new realms of research in response to rapidly evolving real problems.

This entails:
Creating a new science, one that brings together, into one unified whole, quantum physics, artificial intelligence, supercomputers, telecommunications, networking, next-generation semiconductors, and theoretical studies.
Promoting through the life sciences advancements in our understanding of Life and Human Life from the molecular level to the individual, community, and societal levels.
Establishing environmental resource science, a branch that will usher in a society where resources and energy that until now were consumed and lost will henceforth be used sustainably through recycling and reuse.
Spurring the basic sciences to investigate yet unexplored fields where matter, light, and life still conceal their deepest secrets.
Merging scholarship and data in disparate fields into the computational and information sciences to initiate a problem-solving “digital transformation” that enables informatics research to build bridges between the real and the cyber world.

4. Recruiting of research talent: Brains Without Borders

To enable the best research minds - from Japan of course, together with the best investigative minds everywhere - to convene and associate with each other and train the next generation of eminent researchers and engineers, instilling in them the aptitude and skills necessary to meet tomorrow's challenges, making RIKEN an ever better setting for sharing exciting new ideas.

This entails:
Planning research career paths that offer both stability and mobility, through a comprehensive panoramic view of RIKEN’s place in Japan’s research system in its entirety.
Building organizational structures that maximally stimulate and sustain junior and senior researchers’ strengths.
Generating new research support knowhow to link advanced studies to people’s lives today.
Assembling from every corner of the globe the most ambitious world-class investigative talent to create an open research environment at a global standard of inclusivity, diversity, and sustainability.

5. Industry-society tie-ups

To forge ties between our society and industry through study of the ever-growing range of modern science and technology, from basic research to applications, to determine which direction it should turn next for the better society still under construction.

This entails:
Contributing to the creation of new industries for a knowledge-intensive society.
Structuring Science and Technology to support the improvement of systems to found a recycling-oriented society both sustaining and developing the global commons.
Restructuring and activating new future-orienting arrangements between Industry and Academia to promote bench-to-business implementations and technology transfers.
Cultivating exchanges of views with the full range of stakeholders in society.

6. Governance and management

To become more responsive to the needs and aspirations of society and the world by making organizational responses more reliable and adaptable to programs linking desirable research trends to systematic management support promoting such research.

This entails:
Reinforcing ties with and among all of RIKEN’s research arms, from its headquarters and offices to RIKEN Innovation, RIKEN Suuri, and other affiliated corporations to orient operations in directions sought by researchers.
Reforming management unflinchingly to maximize researchers’ scientific output while at the same time encouraging greater solidarity in the indispensable collaboration of researchers and administrators.
Increasing efficiency, stability, and planning, taking advantage of RIKEN’s scale merits as one of the world’s greatest scientific research establishments.
Mobilizing management resources more flexibly, appropriately, and effectively to achieve yet higher overall outputs.
Organizing and expanding programs to focus research on cutting-edge technologies of the most far-reaching importance nationally and socially and so equip Japan and the world with tomorrow’s scientific and technological engines for social change.
Responding thoughtfully to outside views and suggestions regarding our globally oriented research and its administration to ensure that RIKEN is correctly understood and appreciated by the world community.

Board of Executive Directors

RIKEN's highest policy-making body is the Board of Executive Directors, composed of the president and executive directors. RIKEN also has two auditors which oversee the activities of RIKEN as a whole.

Executive Directors

Governance

Individual research centers at each campus are managed by a director who exercises strong leadership in the strategic management of the center. In making decisions on the direction of research and administration, RIKEN strives to strike a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches by seeking the advice and cooperation of committees and councils established with the aim of achieving optimal scientific governance.

Advisory Councils

Interim RIKEN Advisory Council in 2021

RIKEN regularly evaluates its own research themes and the performance of its scientists based on governmental guidelines. In carrying out this important work, RIKEN is guided by the RIKEN Advisory Council (RAC) and the individual centers' Advisory Councils.

The RIKEN Advisory Council is composed of world-famous scientists, both Japanese and international, as well as individuals with experience in managing research institutes. The RAC meeting, held every two or three years, provides recommendations on both general research activities and the overall management of RIKEN, and provides guidance on future research strategies and improvement to management structures.

• Read the reports from previous RAC meetings.
• Read more about RIKEN's governance in its reports.

The individual Advisory Councils for centers are bodies set up in each research center and institute to receive recommendations from eminent Japanese and international scientists in their respective fields of research. The council recommendations form an integral part of the ongoing appraisal of RIKEN's performance as a scientific research organization.