About 4Revs GIH

NELIS and the 4Revs Global Innovation Hub

A One-Generation Project for Planetary Survival

Timeline

A Decade in the Making

The Story Behind

Origins: A Seed Planted in Shiga

In 2015, on the shores of Lake Biwa in Omi-Hachiman, Shiga Prefecture — one of Japan's most ancient and ecologically rich regions — Peter David Pedersen, Tatuo Akimura and Masahito Yamamoto founded NELIS, the Next Leaders' Initiative for Sustainability. Shiga had long embodied a fragile but instructive balance between economic vitality and ecological stewardship, and it was here that NELIS took root with a deceptively simple ambition: to empower the next generation of sustainability leaders and to catalyse the next generation of sustainability innovation.

From the outset, NELIS operated on a conviction that runs against the grain of conventional institutional thinking. Real and lasting transformation — the kind that bends the arc of planetary history — does not emerge from the top down, from policy mandates or corporate compliance frameworks. It emerges from people: young, passionate, globally connected people who carry both local wisdom and a planetary sense of responsibility. NELIS was built to find those people, connect them, and give them the knowledge, networks and platforms to act.

www.nelisglobal.org

Two Flagship Initiatives, One Shared Vision

By 2020, NELIS had crystallised its ambition into two flagship programs, each addressing a different dimension of the transformation it sought to bring about.

The first was the 4Revs Global Innovation Hub — launched in April 2020 with twenty-one Japanese corporations and a curated group of global sustainability practitioners drawn from the NELIS network. The name encodes both a diagnosis and a direction: humanity faces four existential survival challenges — food and agriculture, water security, resource cycles and ecosystems, and energy and climate change — and meeting them will require not incremental adjustment but revolution across all four simultaneously. 4Revs GIH was conceived as the institutional vehicle through which Japanese corporate capability and global sustainability knowledge could be fused into transformative business innovation.

The second flagship — launched in the same year — was the One Million Leaders Fellowship (OML). Where 4Revs GIH looks inward to the corporate world, OML looks outward to the Global South. Its aim is precisely what the name declares: to train and empower one million young sustainability leaders and social innovators across Africa, Asia, the Arab world and Latin America. 

The two programs are not parallel but complementary. Japan's corporations bring capital, technology and supply chain reach; OML's fellows bring ground-level knowledge, local networks and an urgency born of living at the frontlines of the planetary crisis. The Möbius loop at the heart of NELIS's philosophy holds that by supporting others to grow, you grow yourself — that the act of helping Global South innovators scale their ideas is inseparable from the development of Japan's own leadership capacity.

2020–2024: Building the Ecosystem Online and In Person

The early years of 4Revs GIH were shaped, like so much else, by the pandemic. Forced into digital-first operation, the initiative discovered something unexpected: the constraints of online engagement accelerated the development of its intellectual infrastructure. Research gatherings, intelligence sessions and cross-sector workshops convened participants from across Japan and beyond without the friction of geography, and over the course of four years a total of ninety-seven companies participated in 4Revs GIH activities — an accumulated community of practice that spans consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, construction, food and agriculture, retail, chemicals, and mobility.

As the world reopened, 4Revs GIH moved increasingly into face-to-face engagement, finding — as its founders had always believed — that genuine co-creation requires physical presence, shared meals and the kind of serendipitous encounter that no video platform can replicate.

2024: An Innovation Framework Takes Shape

2024 was an intellectual watershed for 4Revs GIH. Building on four years of research gatherings, global intelligence-gathering and dialogue with practitioners across six continents, the initiative developed the Seven Future Narratives — a framework of seven interconnected stories about the world humanity needs to build by 2050. These are not predictions but normative visions: purposeful accounts of the future that serve as compasses for innovation rather than forecasts of what will happen.

The Seven Narratives span the full arc of the four survival challenges: Reinventing the Food System; Natural Capital Restoration; Intelligent Materials Pooling; Climate and Smart Energy; Industry as a Forest; Lifestyles, Education and Empowerment; and Regenerative Human Settlements. Each narrative has been developed in both English and Japanese, and each serves as a shared language through which member companies can orient their strategic conversations.

In parallel, 4Revs GIH began the systematic mapping of sixty sustainable markets — new economic territories that will emerge as the four survival challenges are addressed. Spanning sectors from regenerative agriculture and water technology to circular materials and smart energy systems, these sixty markets constitute a global opportunity map: the terrain on which the businesses of the next generation will be built. Together, the Seven Narratives and the sixty markets now form the innovation framework that gives 4Revs GIH its distinctive intellectual identity.

2025: Structure, Consortium and the First Harvest

In 2025 the initiative took a significant organisational step forward. Seven companies joined 4Revs GIH as steering group members — committing not merely to participation but to co-leadership. Working in close partnership with the NELIS team, this steering group laid out a detailed roadmap for the initiative from 2026 to 2030: a shared plan for building Japan's first dedicated sustainability innovation hub, expanding the membership, launching new consortia and delivering real new business initiatives with corporate partners.

Also in 2025, the first concrete fruit of the 4Revs GIH ecosystem emerged in the form of JAFAS — the Japan Food and Agriculture Society. Launched under the 4Revs GIH umbrella with sixteen companies from Japan's food and agriculture sector, JAFAS brought together some of the country's most consequential food businesses to work on two urgent themes: regenerative agriculture and food upcycling. JAFAS represents a new model for corporate collaboration — not a trade association defending incumbency, but an implementation-oriented consortium actively designing the food system of 2050 from the inside.

www.jafas.jp

2026: The Hub Opens Its Doors

The year 2026 marks the most visible transformation in 4Revs GIH's six-year history. With fourteen Japanese corporations as members — five as steering group members, nine as general members — the initiative opened a dedicated hub space at WeWork Hibiya Fort Tower in central Tokyo: a physical home for co-creation, a place where member companies can encounter each other not as competitors but as co-architects of a shared future.

Alongside the physical hub, 4Revs GIH launched the D&O Lab — Data and Opportunity Lab — a proprietary digital platform and innovation database containing intelligence on more than two thousand sustainability startups and four thousand venture capital funds worldwide, organised by narrative and market. The D&O Lab gives member companies something previously unavailable in Japan: real-time, structured access to the global sustainability innovation ecosystem, searchable by theme, region and stage.

Most significantly, 2026 sees the launch of NANCI — the Narrative-Driven Co-Creative Innovation Program — the centrepiece of 4Revs GIH's work with its member companies. NANCI is a structured annual programme in which cross-company teams use the Seven Narratives as their starting point, explore the sixty sustainable markets through the D&O Lab, and work their way — through weekly sessions, workshops and stage-gate reviews — from narrative to business model to proof of concept. It is the mechanism through which 4Revs GIH moves from conversation to creation.

From October 2026, a second implementation consortium is due to launch beneath the 4Revs GIH umbrella: LUCI — Life Urbanism Cities Industry. Targeting ten to fifteen companies in construction, real estate, mobility, infrastructure and related sectors, LUCI will focus on the innovation challenge that 4Revs GIH calls "Industry as a Forest" — the transformation of industrial and urban systems from extractive to regenerative, from linear to circular, from damaging to restorative. The analogy is deliberate: a forest is not merely a collection of trees but a self-sustaining ecosystem in which every element contributes to the health of the whole. That is the model for the industrial and urban system that LUCI will work to design and build.

2027–2030: An APAC Sustainability Innovation Hub

The ambitions for 4Revs GIH over the next four years are commensurate with the urgency of the challenges it addresses. The roadmap that the steering group and NELIS have developed together sets out a clear direction: by 2030, 4Revs GIH aims to be established as the pre-eminent sustainability innovation hub in the Asia-Pacific region.

This means growing the membership to at least forty companies, representing a broad cross-section of Japanese industry and increasingly attracting international partners from across the region. It means expanding the hub space, deepening the global network — which already includes formal partnerships with BLOXHUB in Copenhagen and Sustainable Ventures in London — and activating new collaborative relationships with innovation hubs, universities, municipalities and public institutions across APAC and beyond.

Above all, it means delivering: real new business initiatives, co-created by member companies within the 4Revs GIH framework, that address the four survival challenges in commercially viable and scalable ways. The measure of success is not the number of workshops held or reports published — it is the number of businesses launched, technologies deployed, ecosystems redesigned and tonnes of carbon not emitted.

By 2030, 4Revs GIH will also be on track to achieve financial sustainability in its own right — a hub that generates sufficient revenue from membership, programme fees and commissioned projects to grow and operate independently, beyond the founding period and beyond 2030.

What Makes 4Revs GIH Different

Japan has no shortage of sustainability initiatives, corporate ESG commitments or innovation programmes. What makes 4Revs GIH distinctive is harder to name but immediately felt by those who participate in it.

It begins with the intellectual framework. The Seven Narratives and sixty markets are not generic SDG categories or regulatory compliance checklists. They are purposeful, opinionated accounts of where the world needs to go and what the business opportunities of the transition look like — developed through years of original research, refined through dialogue with global practitioners and calibrated to the specific strengths and blindspots of Japanese industry.

It continues with the ecosystem. 4Revs GIH is not a conference series or a consulting engagement. It is a living community — a cross-industry, cross-cultural ecosystem in which companies encounter each other, encounter global partners and encounter the innovators, researchers and entrepreneurs who are already building the world of 2050. The D&O Lab makes that global ecosystem searchable; the hub space makes it tangible; NANCI makes it productive.

And it rests, ultimately, on a philosophy of hope. The planetary crisis is real and the urgency is acute. But the response cannot be merely reactive — driven by fear, compliance and risk management. The response that NELIS and 4Revs GIH are building is driven by something more durable: by the conviction and by the growing community of companies and practitioners who have joined NELIS and 4Revs GIH, that business — reimagined, redirected and reconnected to the living systems on which it depends — is among the most powerful forces available to humanity in the task of building a world worth living in.

NELIS — Next Leaders' Initiative for Sustainability — was established in Omi-Hachiman, Shiga, Japan in 2015. Its two flagship programmes, 4Revs Global Innovation Hub and the One Million Leaders Fellowship, operate across Japan, the Global South and an expanding network of global partners. For more information: www.nelisglobal.org

Steering Committee Member

Seven & i Holdings Co., Ltd.
TAISEI CORPORATION
Daicel Corporation
TANEYA Group
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Meiji Holdings Co., Ltd.
 

General Member

Ajinomoto Co., Inc.
ASKUL Corporation
Suntory Holdings Limited
Kao Corporation
Sumitomo Mitsui Auto Service Company, Limited
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation
Yachiyo Engineering Co., Ltd.
ROHTO Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.