2026 New Year Greeting

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Happy New Year.

Looking back, this initiative strategically began in the 2020s, when academic books on Japanese long-lived companies were published simultaneously in both the East and the West. In China, a research team led by Professor Li Xinchun of Sun Yat-sen University published research results, including long-term field surveys, in their native languages in 2020, and in Germany, the Witten Institute for Family Business (WIFU) published them in 2023. Specifically, the first INGLLE event was a Japan-China joint mini-symposium held in December 2023 to welcome a delegation from Tsinghua University to Japan for research on long-lived companies.

Since then, at the initiative of researchers from Sun Yat-sen University, this joint research project has developed into quarterly online research meetings, along with an annual in-person gathering at the end of each year to deepen mutual exchange and friendship. Subsequently, with the participation of researchers from Korea, the meetings officially adopted English as the conference language. By the second year, in 2025, the quarterly research meetings had grown into a major endeavor, attracting researchers from up to 13 countries, mainly from Europe and Asia. In September of that same year, this modest initiative was formally launched as an international program of the Research Institute of Centennial Management (RICM), taking on a new name—the “International Research Center for Centennial Management (ICC)”—and embarking on a fresh start with the international leadership team comprising of Germany, China, Poland and Japan

Now, in 2026, this initiative enters its third year. The ICC consists of three main divisions. The first is the quarterly research meeting that has continued since the founding stage, named INGLEE, which has grown into an academic platform shared by researchers on long-lived enterprises worldwide. From its first meeting in 2023 through December 2025, a total of 34 researchers from around the world were presented at INGLEE, with approximately 250 researchers and practitioners participating in total. INGLEE is scheduled to continue a quarterly basis in 2026, and we warmly welcome researchers on long-lived enterprises from across the globe.

The second division is an online journal, which will publish and archive the abstracts of presentations delivered at INGLEE. The third is a network platform—an online forum where not only participating researchers, but also scholars and practitioners interested in the study of long-lived enterprises, can gather, interact freely, and learn from one another. This year, we aim to further enhance these three functions and hope that the Center will become a global hub for research on long-lived enterprises.

As the world moves toward 2030 with the goal of achieving the SDGs, every effort is being made to build a sustainable society. Long-lived enterprises themselves represent a major contribution to a sustainable economic and social system, and the achievement  of international collaborative research conducted at the ICC will undoubtedly serve as a guiding beacon for the future society toward which the world is heading.

We sincerely hope that many researchers from around the world will continue to come together this year, stimulating one another and advancing together.Thank you very much.

Toshio Goto,