About Us

What is the VISI-ONE Innovation Hub?

VISI-ONE Innovation Hub is a co-creation center where “vision issues” are the starting point. People with lived experience of visual challenges, alongside partners from business, government, education, and technology, meet here to question how society is “designed to be seen” and to create change together.

What matters to us is moving beyond the idea that “some people have problems and others fix them.” We aim for relationships where everyone becomes a co-owner of the questions we need to ask.

We discuss challenges on equal footing and, regardless of whether someone is sighted or not, we work together to pilot, implement, and systematize solutions—so we can deliver concrete change to society.

What do we mean by “vision issues”?

At VISI-ONE Innovation Hub, “vision issues” goes beyond legal definitions of visual disability. It includes everyday realities that many people experience, such as:

Trouble telling colors apart.
Finding text harder to read with age.
Depending on glasses or contacts to get through the day.
Glare that makes screens or signs unreadable.

These aren’t always labeled as “disabilities,” but they are real—and they can exclude people when environments and systems don’t account for them.

We focus less on “seeing less clearly” itself and more on the man‑made barriers it creates—when products, services, spaces, and policies are designed without these realities in mind. Visual challenges are both personal experiences and a signal that society’s default settings need to change.

This isn’t only a medical or social‑care issue. It’s a design, technology, business, education, and public policy challenge—one where people from every sector can make a difference. When we design for visual diversity, we improve life for everyone.

We bring people with lived experience together with companies, startups, government, NGOs, universities, and media—on equal footing—to:

Surface real‑world challenges.
Co‑create and test solutions.
Implement and scale what works.

Whether you’re a practitioner, policymaker, technologist, educator, designer, or someone with lived experience, we invite you to help remove barriers and expand access for all.

Roots of VISI-ONE
inspired by blind football

VISI-ONE Innovation Hub was founded as a place for co‑creating solutions to visual challenges, through collaboration among diverse partners: the International Blind Football Foundation (IBF Foundation), the Japan Blind Football Association, Skylight Consulting Inc., Santen Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., and others from different fields. At its core is our practice with the sport of blind football.

In blind football, athletes who are blind play on the same team as sighted guides, coaches, and goalkeepers—connected by voice and trust. We learned, firsthand, what it means for people with and without sight, and with different roles, to work together on equal footing.

That way of being is the prototype of the “co‑creation” we aim for at VISI-ONE Innovation Hub. Teamwork built on the premise of different ways of seeing is a core idea that shapes everything we do.

Drawing on these experiences, relationships, and networks, VISI-ONE Innovation Hub cultivates the ground where people from many backgrounds can meet, learn from each other, and move from dialogue to action.

The future we’re building at
VISI-ONE Innovation Hub

VISI-ONE Innovation Hub was launched to address visual challenges through collaboration among diverse organizations. Our foundation is the combined strength of the IBF Foundation’s international network, the Japan Blind Football Association’s track record in para sport, Skylight Consulting’s business insight and innovation capability, and Santen Pharmaceutical’s medical expertise in vision—brought together into one shared effort.

So far, we’ve run accelerator programs, leadership camps, and ideathons on visual challenges in Japan and abroad. Launching the hub allows us to continue this work while creating structures where people from many backgrounds can participate by playing to their strengths. Above all, we prioritize ensuring that people with lived experience are not merely recipients of support, but the main co-creators.

Concretely, we aim to connect communities of people with visual challenges and communities of supporters, so each can initiate and drive projects from their own perspective. To enable this, our secretariat plans events, shares information, and supports members’ activities. Ultimately, by bringing together companies, government, and people with lived experience to speak across roles—and by fusing diverse fields—we will help update how society works.

Our vision is not a society where people who are blind or have low vision must struggle, but a world where their presence becomes a catalyst for making society kinder for everyone. That is the future VISI-ONE Innovation Hub is working toward.