You are in your late 50s and looking for a retirement home. Your needs are very different from when you were in your harassed 30s, managing kids and a demanding career. Walk into the Panasonic Centre in Osaka and there are several different renovation examples you can choose from. Called Re-Life stories, Panasonic is scripting new lifestyles for Japan’s populace, whose average age will be 50 in year 2025.

In this beautiful multi-storeyed studio, there are mock-ups of homes designed for a retired couple, an elderly lady with physical disabilities living alone, a family with cats, a family that spends a lot of time outdoors and so on. You see interesting gadgets and gizmos in most of these homes — a dehumidifier for shoes that takes the sweaty smells out of them, smart electric wheelchairs, sensors that can detect one’s mood and change the lighting, music and visuals on the screens to suit it. The cat home has wall to wall ledges near the ceiling for the felines to jump up on, and caves for them to sleep in. It is temperature controlled to keep pets comfortable.

But why is an electronics company, known for its televisions, air-conditioners and electric cookers, getting into re-designing homes and even offering to find houses and help with support services like nursing care?

Well, you could say that Panasonic itself is in the midst of a Re-Life story! The 100-year-old corporation that began life as Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works, making bulb sockets and bicycle lamps, before moving into an impressive array of household appliances, has used its centennial anniversary to re-examine its raison d’etre and script a new vision for the next 100 years.

A services-centred approach, with technology at the heart of it, is the new Panasonic story. The electronics giant is also moving away from mass to smart offerings. And rather than selling products, it is suggesting new lifestyles to people.

At the Cross-Value Innovation Forum in Tokyo, a big bash to celebrate its hundred years, Kazuhiro Tsuga, the CEO and President of Panasonic, shares with a large audience how the company has introspected on the meaning of existence of the company in society today. When it began life, it delivered products under the brand name National that people needed for their day-to-day living. As people upgraded their lives, Panasonic upgraded its products, very often ahead of the curve. But in today’s rapidly changing society, where each individual has a different need, Panasonic has decided to offer “lifestyle updates” rather than mere upgrades.

Lifestyle update

“Now times have changed. We cannot simply offer household products that we think are good, but we need to develop things that users can customise and update according to their diverse needs,” said Tsuga in his address. The key phrase is ‘Lifestyle updates’. Tsuga pointed out that Lifestyle is not just about home alone, but about mobility, and diverse activities that the consumer undertakes and Panasonic wants to be a part of all of it. Implementation of lifestyle updates will come by using data on consumption habits and applying it in real time.

In his keynote, Tsuga said that future products would be intentionally left incomplete so that they had the margin to grow to suit diverse needs. “The days of home appliances becoming obsolete will soon be over,” he said. “They must fit with and evolve with the times.”

Tsuga also outlined the company’s new services vision and introduced the company’s HomeX project. This is information infrastructure in a person’s home that understands the inhabitant’s needs and moods. A single HomeX panel can control almost all the appliances in the home, remind you to watch a show, or suggest recipes.

Services showcase

A walk through the exhibition areas of the Forum provided a clearer vision of where Panasonic is headed and its services vision as well as its B2B focus. Here Panasonic was showing off many prototypes in fields as diverse as mobility, homes, sports, city activation (airports and public spaces) as well as manufacturing facilities involving robotics, AI (artificial intelligence) and IOT (internet of things). Take, for instance, its work on sustainable smart towns built in collaboration with public sector utilities and private companies — Fujisawa SST being an example — where the town shares services through apps and is managed by a consortium of companies. Smart homes of the future could have service ports — a space in the home that can double up as a service area, a crèche, a baking class, etc — with this space being managed by an app. A glimpse of our future lifestyle also involved a personal porter that follows you around like a pet as you shop. Stare at it and it opens up to swallow your bags. In the mobility area, an eye-popping exhibit is a self-driving car, where you can Face Time with your parents through a screen in the vehicle, or learn from an online tutorial. In the city activation zone, you see airports of the future with large mirrors that recognise you and flash your vital stats — these could potentially check you in.

Realising that innovation on this scale cannot be all in-house, Panasonic has kicked off a strategy of partnerships and incorporating external ideas. It is investing in start-ups or funding projects that could be game changers.

A glimpse of these showed some really exciting ideas such as a walking stick with a smart phone attached to the handle (remember Japan has a significant elderly populace), smart lighting solutions, a powered wear garment that helps the user lift heavy objects with ease and so on.

Beyond borders

For Panasonic, like many other Japanese companies struggling with a shrinking domestic market and declining consumption, growth can only come beyond its own borders. And China is an enticing market where Tsuga said the company is looking to make big inroads through partnerships. Panasonic has tied up with e-commerce giant Alibaba and also entered into a partnership with a construction company there to build smart homes.

How will Panasonic’s new vision play out in India? Back home, Manish Sharma, president and CEO, Panasonic India, describes how India is already in line with this vision. “We have been steadily moving into a service-based approach with our technological solutions at the helm of it,” he says. He points to the India Innovation Centre (IIC) in Bengaluru set up to analyse market trends and create service-based solutions across industries such as mobility, industrial, finance and energy storage.

“We are also looking at evolving our B2C line of products into service-based offerings, a practice in which IIC will be assisting us ,” he says. The centre was the brainchild behind the establishment of the Arbo platform (virtual assistant) for Panasonic smartphones.

Further, says Sharma, Panasonic has also diversified its services-based approach across its B2B division as well for products and solutions such as security and surveillance, energy storage and retail solutions as well.

Panasonic’s Re-Life script for the next 100 years sounds bold and audacious. Now, should the market and society move in some other direction, it should also display an agility to rewrite the script quickly.

The writer attended the Cross-Value Innovation Forum in Japan at the invitation of Panasonic

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