• DSEI Japan will take place 18-20 November 2019 in Makuhari Messe, Japan

The UK’s Defence Growth Partnership (DGP) will be supporting international business opportunities at DSEI Japan in November, with a Defence Industry Dialogue (DID) scheduled to take place during the event.

Following on from a very successful DID at DSEI in London in September, the event will focus on finding new opportunities for cooperation between UK and Japanese companies.

In particular, the Japanese military has stated that it wishes to enhance its capability in the areas of Space, Cyber Security and Electronic Warfare to protect Japanese interests against future threats.

The DGP believes that enhanced capabilities in these and other areas will be best delivered under international partnerships and collaborative innovation, to the benefit of both Japanese and UK industry. In order to support this, the DGP has been working to support UK-Japan collaboration for the past 36 months, working alongside organisations such as the Society of Japanese Aerospace Companies (SJAC) to build on the strong UK-Japan relationship.

The DID at DSEI Japan will include a series of workshops designed to continue collaborative discussions across these topics, in order to uncover areas of joint industry-to-industry interest that could result in UK-Japan collaborative projects. These topics and the DID itself is a collaborative effort, arranged and facilitated with the support and input of the SJAC. The workshops will include discussions, company presentations and support for follow up industry meetings.

The DID will be followed by Industry Engagement Forums in both the UK and Japan in the proceeding months, with the goal of establishing a long-standing, balanced and reciprocal relationship between UK industry and Japan.

“Ultimately we are looking to drive innovation from invention to reality and inspire problem solving to deliver experimentation, trials, and results within timeframes that suit the needs of both the UK and Japanese industry and government customers,” Martin Rowse, Japan Market Development Lead, DGP, said. “We have identified a number of law, policy, process and culture barriers to joint UK-Japan collaboration, and the DGP intends to drive forward enablers to overcome these so that we can foster innovation and enable the UK and Japan to jointly meet the defence and security challenges of the coming decade.”