Yutaka Matsuo

Yutaka Matsuo, born 1975 in Sakaide, Kagawa, is a professor at the University of Tokyo's Department of Technology Management for Innovation, working on artificial intelligence and web engineering. The line in his profile that stops me isn't a paper count. It's that he pushes his students to start companies, and several of those companies have gone public. Japan has heard the same complaint about itself for decades: strong basic research, weak at turning it into a business. Matsuo's answer wasn't an op-ed. It was a lab that treats founding a company as a legitimate outcome of graduate study, run patiently for years until the results were undeniable. He was named Changemaker of the Year in 2016, and honestly that title fits better than most awards fit their recipients. What I take from him is a quieter lesson about influence: you can shape a field more durably by changing what your students believe is possible than by any single result of your own.

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Name (English)

Yutaka Matsuo

Name (Japanese)

松尾豊

Reading

まつお ゆたか

Born

January 26, 1975 (age 51)

Origin

Sakaide, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

engineer / computer scientist

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aquarius / Rabbit

University

University of Tokyo

Awards & achievements

• 2016 Nikkei Changemaker of the Year

• Xhttps://x.com/ymatsuo
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka%20Matsuo
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%BE%E5%B0%BE%E8%B1%8A
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11529703

Tags

• Kagawa Prefecture
• engineer
• computer scientist

Last updated

September 29, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.