A co-creation platform empowering anyone, anywhere, to generate limitless ideas.

Issue

People of all ages and backgrounds come together to shape the future—joyfully.

The Sumitomo Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai brings together more than 30 companies from the Sumitomo Group. Each carries forward a business philosophy passed down through generations, along with countless technologies, initiatives, and the passion behind them. Through content designed to entertain people of all ages, this project reveals the potential of these companies' advanced technologies and efforts—work rarely visible in everyday life—with the goal of solving shared global challenges and building a richer future for society.

Creation

What Is "Seed of the Future," the Participatory Co-Creation Project?

This project transforms more than 700 cutting-edge technologies and initiatives from Sumitomo Group companies into a database. Built on "ideaflow"—a system that turns patents into new business ideas—an AI engine generates concepts for the future from this data. Each idea, born from a commitment to solving humanity's shared challenges and building a richer future society, is named a "Mirai no Tane" (Seed of the Future) and shared with the world. The vision: these seeds will one day sprout and grow, leading to real solutions and a more abundant future.

Inside the Sumitomo Pavilion, visitors can explore each company's advanced technologies and initiatives through exhibits and physical displays, alongside more than 700 "Mirai no Tane" on show throughout the event. The same AI engine also powers a web platform where anyone can easily generate their own "future idea"—their own Mirai no Tane—launching this project into a truly participatory, co-creative effort. A built-in sharing feature lets people around the world exchange the ideas they create, turning the project into a global effort to solve common challenges and build a richer future.

Technology

Evolving Shape, Phase by Phase

To enable rapid PDCA cycles, the Mirai no Tane team restructured the project's approach at each phase. In the initial phase, they used prototyping tools and a large language model to replicate ideaflow's image-based idea-generation flow. Since this project draws ideas from technologies and initiatives rather than patents, the team tuned the output to a tone that would appeal to people of all ages. Because the ideas would be shown at the Expo to international visitors, the system generated English versions alongside the Japanese ones. Translation is a task LLMs handle well, but to keep technical terms and idea concepts aligned across languages, the team built a mechanism where the AI itself switches languages during generation based on the selected output language.

For the exhibition phase, they built a dedicated dashboard to produce nearly 60,000 ideas total, using the prototyped AI engine to generate them at scale. Since a different reviewer checked each technology area, the system also included a feature to automatically output PDFs for review.

In the final phase, the team deployed a fully automated, robust AI system on the cloud, ready for general users to access as web content.

Future

Open to the World, a Co-Creation Legacy for the Future

"Seed of the Future" runs on a custom system built by Konel, based on "ideaflow" from Chizai Zukan (Intellectual Property Illustrated). Planning and experience design come from ONE TO TEN Inc., the team behind "JUNKAN – Where Ideas Meet," a platform that gathered over 16,000 social challenges and ideas from around the world at Expo Dubai. Together with the Sumitomo Pavilion, these three companies developed both the co-creation platform and its dedicated website. Ideas generated through the project, along with details on the Sumitomo Group technologies and initiatives behind them, are published on the site as they're created. Even after the Expo ends, they'll live on in an archive on the Sumitomo Group's website—shared with the world as ideas belonging to all of humanity.