Bay labs, establishing Rakuten in
the Bay Area innovation ecosystem (Rakuten)

With a view to establish Rakuten as a key player in the Bay Area innovation ecosystem, Rakuten asked us–along with Pininfarina–to help define a strategy and execution plan to launch a 5G lab and a customer experience centre in the San Francisco Bay area by September 2020. 

Objectives:

• Engage clients, high-tech talents, influencers and Rakuten’s own personnel; 
• Make it easier for partners to work with Rakuten 
• Aim at standing out relative to actual competitors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and perceptual competitors such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon and the typical Bay Area start-ups; 
• Build around the new services & use cases Rakuten can enable for its clients, Rakuten’s key technological assets (cloud-native virtualized mobile network, zero-.touch operations, AST, etc.), and Rakuten’s core brand values (sustainability, accessibility, etc.);