NEWS

OPT, Inc. (Head Office: Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo; President & CEO: Daisuke Kanazawa; hereinafter “OPT”), an Innovation Agency leading the digital shift, established the LINE Innovation Center on April 1, 2020. This is an open innovation organization that promotes digital shift by maximizing utilization of the LINE platform provided by LINE Corporation (Head Office: Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo; CEO and President: Takeshi Idezawa).

  

Until now, companies’ utilization of LINE was mostly focused on “more efficient marketing.” However, LINE is also a platform with over 83 million users (as of December 2019), which can provide the foundation for offering a wide range of services including procedures related to financial products and the payment of public utility charges. This aspect is gaining recognition in the context of the increasing needs related to digital shift. The number of companies introducing LINE for the purposes of updating their business model and social structure, including “corporate value enhancement” and “positioning as social infrastructure,” is growing rapidly.

In this context, OPT, which has attained Diamond, the highest level of certification as a Technology Partner in the communication section of the LINE Biz Partner Program (*1), has engaged for some time in the development of services utilizing the LINE API (*2) to meet the needs of corporate customers. In order to further drive this collaboration, OPT has gone beyond the boundaries of the development partner and established the LINE Innovation Center as an internal open innovation organization to plan, design, and develop “customers’ business creation.”

Previously separate divisions responsible for LINE advertising operation and LINE official account operational support were consolidated into the LINE Innovation Center to facilitate swifter decision making. At the same time, the LINE Innovation Center also hires new specialized personnel proficient in business development. During 2020, OPT will increase the scale of the LINE Innovation Center by around 30 business development members to a total of around 100. By 2023, OPT aims to create applications of “LINE x digital shift” in seven industries in which digital shift is expected to provide overwhelming convenience for consumers, including relatively conventional industries such as finance, medicine, and public services.
Yasushi Ishihara, Executive Officer of OPT, and Tsubasa Hayata, General Manager of OPT’s LINE Strategy Department, will be appointed Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of the newly-established LINE Innovation Center.

OPT will work to further strengthen cooperation with LINE, to co-create and pursue environments where companies can feel secure about adopting LINE’s API and other corporate services as part of their business infrastructure. Moreover, OPT will endeavor to create a society where consumers use LINE to simplify a range of troublesome and time-consuming procedures, to achieve a stress-free lifestyle.