By Cheechee Lin
Masahiro “Hiro” Akashi (’15) is a second-year UCLA Anderson MBA candidate with a passion for integrating technology in the health care industry. Prior to pursuing his degree, Akashi served as management consultant for the Japanese company Swan Dental Group, advising the CEO in operations. Although he was offered the CEO position if he were to stay with the company, Akashi decided to enroll at Anderson to help him achieve his vision of establishing WHITE CROSS, a dental education company he believes will revolutionize the Japanese dental industry.
Akashi is also the 2014 recipient of the Nozawa Fellowship, an annual scholarship awarded to an outstanding Japanese student at Anderson.
Akashi shared the details about WHITE CROSS, his entrepreneurial journey, and the transition from practicing dentistry to dental management.
Tell us about your background. What were you doing prior to pursuing your MBA?
I come from a family of dentists, so pursuing a career in dentistry was the natural path. After graduating from Tohoku University, I worked at Swan, a leading dental organization with seven branches operating in Aichi and Tokyo. During my second year with the company, I became the youngest board director in Swan’s history. A couple years later, I established and led the quality control department. Later on, I advanced to the management consultant position within the company, serving as a direct advisor to the CEO.
You became the youngest board director for Swan Dental Group and were on your way to becoming the CEO, which is a remarkable accomplishment. What prompted you to pursue an MBA degree and change your career trajectory?
After working in dentistry and dental management for over five years, I realized there was a fundamental problem in the Japanese dental market. The education of young dentistry professionals is deficient in hands-on practice. This is the most complicated problem in the Japanese dental market today: young dentists do not have adequate experience to treat patients and also do not have access to the resources needed to expand their knowledge of treatments.
In identifying this problem, I came up with the idea of WHITE CROSS, a platform where dentists and dental treatment companies could share treatment knowledge with each other. Pursuing an MBA was inevitable. I knew that I needed an MBA degree for the success of WHITE CROSS in the future. I could have been well off if I stayed on and took the CEO position, but I would not have had the opportunity to make an impact on the dental industry in Japan. I wanted to take a break from the dental industry to gain valuable business management skills, so I chose to continue my education.
Why did you choose UCLA Anderson?
Anderson has a well-established entrepreneurship program, which I thought would be extremely helpful for my vision in establishing WHITE CROSS. I also wanted to choose a school with a plethora of resources — UCLA has a medical school, a dentistry school and an engineering school. Choosing Anderson has allowed me to take courses across disciplines as well as fully utilize the resources available for my project. Plus, Los Angeles is an amazing city, and UCLA just felt like a strong fit. I also considered the fact that UCLA is highly regarded in Japan, and receiving a degree from Anderson would open many doors for me in the future.
Tell us about WHITE CROSS.
“White” is the color of health care professionals, and “cross” represents the crossing of people. The mission of WHITE CROSS is to improve the quality of health care, keep the dental industry healthy and raise the social value of dentistry.
WHITE CROSS will serve as an online platform that addresses the education problem in the Japanese dental market. By linking dentists, dental assistants and dental hygienists with dental companies, which provide new dental equipment and treatments, WHITE CROSS provides a space in which there will be a free flow of information on dental treatment technologies. Both parties will be able to upload media detailing procedures, thus providing greater access to information. Dentists will also be able to monitor the education progress of their dental assistants.
This is an unprecedented application of technology to the health care field in Japan, and I have great hopes that WHITE CROSS will be the connector of not only dental but also the medical industry, since oral health is essential to the health of the entire body.
My co-founders include a director of a Japanese venture capital firm and a serial entrepreneur who is the founder of an incubator at Tokyo University and former VP at Goldman Sachs.
What inspired the integration of technology with health care?
I actually developed a couple of projects during my years at Swan Dental Group that combined IT with education. I was the first person to introduce iPads to dental education. I provided them to all of Swan’s young dentists who used them to connect with older, more experienced professionals.
I also wrote a detailed dentistry textbook that I provided free of charge to young dentists; I turned down a profitable deal from a textbook company in the process. As part of the Business Creation Option project I started working on this year at Anderson, I developed a plan that incorporated Google Glass to streamline dental office operations — though it did not get off the ground due to funding issues. I decided to venture in a different direction that also incorporated technology into the health care field, and one of my goals for WHITE CROSS is to expand it internationally.
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