Yasuyuki Nishioka is the President of Industrial Value Chain Initiative (IVI) and a Professor of Information Management Design at Hosei University in Tokyo. His research interest includes connected manufacturing, planning and scheduling, platforms for manufacturing and organization intelligence. After receiving a PhD degree in Engineering from Interdisciplinary Course on Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo in 1996, he taught in Tokyo University of Science and Hosei University. From 2003 to 2004, he was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and since then has been a professor of Faculty of Engineering and Design at Hosei University. When he was a director of the production system division of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2014, he formed a group of leaders who wish to make an initiative of digital transformation in manufacturing. Then in 2015, he founded IVI for connected smart manufacturing. He has been leading IVI which currently has more than 500 members including major Japanese enterprises as well as SMEs.