This visit marks a new chapter in a partnership that began in 2018 and has since developed into a deeply integrated exchange between design, science and technology. The centrepiece of this collaboration is STADHI (Science and Technology + Art and Design Hybrid Innovation), a cross-institutional lab co-founded by Dr Marenko and Professor Kayoko Nohara of Tokyo Tech.
At the heart of Dr Marenko’s visit was her keynote at the Hybrid Innovation Symposium, where she delivered a presentation of her paper titled “Cultivating the Innovator Mindset: A Lifelong Journey”. With over 50 participants, including senior management, faculty and industry leaders, the event spotlighted the unique strengths of Hybrid Innovation, a transdisciplinary training programme combining academic insight with industrial expertise.
Running over six months, Hybrid Innovation offers participants a series of ten sessions, meeting fortnightly to engage with talks and work on live briefs. The programme begins in October and culminates each April in the final symposium — a space for teams to present their work and celebrate the collaborative learning journey.
A sign of the programme’s growing success is that many of the companies return year after year — including major players like Mitsubishi and Toyota — each time sending new team members to take part.
The 2024–25 edition explored the theme of Regenerative Design, using fictional industry scenarios set in Akiruno — a semi-rural region on the western edge of Tokyo. What made this edition especially meaningful was its grounding in place, as participants were asked to reflect not only on human users, but also imagine the thoughts of a tree, fish, and even flowers.
“It was the first time the teams were asked to work with a real location,” says Dr Marenko. “That was a significant shift because it situated the practical work within real-world innovation, issues, and stakeholders.”
The Hybrid Innovation programme continues to evolve, with ambitions for formal accreditation and pilot workshops at CSM, including a January 2026 event focused on “Wellbeing,” to be developed across creative disciplines such as biodesign, digital partnerships, and business innovation.
Across six years, STADHI and Hybrid Innovation have attracted £762,000 in funding from research councils, foundations and industry — a testament to the growing demand for design-led innovation with social impact.
The visit also included high-level meetings with Science Tokyo’s senior leadership. Not only did Dr Marenko present on the CSM–Science Tokyo collaboration to President Naoto Ohtake and Vice-President Jun-ichi Imura, but she also met with Prof. Nobuhiro Hayashi, Vice-President for International Strategy, who encouraged submission of a funding proposal to support a new R&D institute aligned with STADHI’s aims: collaborative learning, transdisciplinarity, and social impact.
Alongside public events and institutional dialogues, Dr Marenko and her collaborators continued developing future-facing projects, including:
Looking ahead, the team is focused on consolidating and expanding their platform with new industry partners, a refined leadership structure, a dedicated website and newsletter, and a bimonthly study group. Projects currently in development include working with healthcare professionals on designing reproductive technologies that acknowledge ethical and existential user concerns — and exploring the social and physical infrastructure needed to support the adoption of hydrogen energy.
That mutual commitment to transdisciplinary thinking recently led the two universities to sign a second Memorandum of Understanding — solidifying their long-term partnership. At the heart of this is a commitment to what the team call “an expanded notion of translation” — a kind of diplomatic knowledge that helps interface very different fields.
“We work like a hinge,” says Dr Marenko. “Holding disciplines together while allowing them enough movement. Curiosity, constructive disagreement, even awkwardness — these are part of the process.”
Long-term, there’s a shared aspiration to establish a transdisciplinary research institute — potentially nomadic or cross-institutional — that would serve as a hub for exploring the practices, ethics and methods of transdisciplinary work. From October 2025, the team will pilot a new model by inviting postdoctoral students from Science Tokyo to join the industry programme — with the goal of eventually opening this up to CSM students as an accredited course.
After nearly eight years, STADHI has entered a new phase of maturity. “It’s only in the past few months that we’ve been able to truly analyse what this evolution has meant,” Dr Marenko reflects. Finding common ground across languages, cultures and disciplines meant unlearning a lot of what she’d known before, but now the team works in utter harmony.
“It was incredibly educational for me because it pushed me to consider new methods of teaching, more nuanced ways of interacting with the students and being able to access their ideas, knowledge, opinions in a way that did not have to rely on them being extremely vocal,” explains Dr Marenko. “Getting different experts into a room doesn’t guarantee success — it takes care, diplomacy, and the ability to translate complex knowledge into meaningful encounters.”