< Keynote Speech >Professor Marlies Whitehouse (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland)
Shared Language and Transdisciplinary: Keys for Prosperity in Business Communication
Transdisciplinarity as the systematic collaboration of experts from practice and academia enables stakeholders toconceptualize real-life problems from new angles and thereby gain insights for practice and theory. It thus broadensstakeholders’ minds and repertoires by revealing novel ways and approaches that would not have been imaginable
in solitary reflection within one's own discipline or field. An indispensable requirement and pivotal driver intransdisciplinary collaboration is a shared language in which issues can be jointly formulated and negotiated andsolutions can be developed. Drawing on examples from finance, I discuss under what conditions transdisciplinary
collaboration, based on shared languages, can facilitate and improve business communication and contribute to
making research and development projects a success for both researchers and practitioners.
< Panel Discussions >1)

Professor Charles Nishikawa (Sasakawa Sports Foundation)

Even under the very difficult circumstances, the Tokyo2020 Olympics and Paralympics ended successfully. The
Games inspired many people around the world and became a beacon of hope to overcome the COVID pandemic.
One of the memorable topics is the 70,000 energetic, dedicated and friendly volunteers, who received much applause
and appreciation from the athletes and international media. They are truly the faces of the games.
The Games’ volunteer programme was a very good example of grass-root transdisciplinary and the members
consisted of people with various backgrounds – business, government and students. The common operation
language is English and Language Services played the key role to relay athletes’ voices, immediately after theirmatches, to the world.
2)

Professor Kazuyo Murata (Ryukoku University)

In this talk, I will introduce an example of transdisciplinary practice, Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) at
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where I was involved as Ph.D candidate. LWP has been developed
through a strong partnership between academia and business sector, focusing on empirical research of workplaceinteraction. The research outcomes have contributed not only to workplace discourse research but also the realsociety. I will also show what I learned from LWP as a researcher.
3)

Professor Gun-Jo Woo (Korea University, President of KABC)

Korean Ministry of Drug & Food Safety (MFDS, formerly Korea Food & Drug Administration) launched a ten-year
national project, National Antimicrobial Management Program (NARMP) to cope with superbacteria and todecrease the antimicrobial resistance rate in Korea. For the success of this national project, MFDS closely
communicate and cooperate with various stakeholders such as other ministries in Korean government, university,
hospitals, animal/aquaculture farming owners, animal drug companies, press and NGOs. Finally, NARMP waschosen as “Good Communicator Government” in Korea. The speaker, the former coordinator of NARMP, will
briefly introduce in the presentation why this project was chosen as the good communicator ministry in Korea while
cooperating and communicating with industry, academia and government.