In April 1st, 2020, Yokohama City University will open its new satellite campus within Yokohama Landmark Tower in the city’s Minato Mirai business district. The campus will be located within NANA Level (NANA Lv.), an innovation center managed by Mitsubishi Estates. The new campus will focus on providing data science courses through their Graduate School of Data Science.
The innovation space the campus will be located within, NANA Lv., is a project space intended for companies that are looking to partner and collaborate with Yokohama City University. The center itself is aiming to give rise to new innovators, startup companies, and business. It’s located primely within Landmark Tower, an integral part of the innovation- and business-fueled Minato Mirai district. Minato Mirai is the central business district in Yokohama, home to commercial facilities like shopping malls and hotels, tourist spots like Ōsanbashi Pier, the Yokohama “Akarenga” Red Brick Warehouse, and Japan’s largest Chinatown, as well as a large number of new and cutting-edge picturesque office buildings that look over Yokohama’s bay area.
Yokohama City has chosen to open their new campus within this bustling economic center, and they are not alone; other Japanese universities have also set plans to open campuses in or around Minato Mirai. In 2021, Kanagawa University is establishing a new campus in Minato Mirai, and this year Kanto Gakuin University is opening one in the nearby Kannai district. Kannai is another major business district of Yokohama, very nearby to Minato Mirai, and recent initiatives have poised it as the center of Yokohama’s startup community.
By gathering talented students within these highly-trafficked, developing locales, Universities like Yokohama City University are looking to help foster a new generation of innovators, while promoting academic-public partnerships and collaboration with the companies working in NANA Lv. Open innovation practices within Yokohama will also allow students and companies within these campuses and NANA Lv. to exchange ideas and technology with major corporations located within Yokohama, something the universities are surely looking to capitalize on as well.
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