Fujitsu’s Policy Twin: Revolutionizing Public Policy with Digital Twins

The “Social Digital Twin” is born

In February TBR met with a Fujitsu team led by Akihiro Inomata, Ph.D., Senior Project Director, Social Digital Twin Core Project, Fujitsu Research, Fujitsu Limited, to discuss Fujitsu’s Policy Twin, a creative application of digital twin technologies to public policy. The following reflects both that discussion and TBR’s ongoing research and analysis around Fujitsu.
 
Fujitsu’s research of “Social Digital Twin” and efforts to bring digital twin concepts and technologies to bear on social issues dates back a few years, although the company initially did not describe the work as “Policy Twin.” As early as 2022, Fujitsu and Japan’s Tsuda University started joint research for community healthcare to find better solutions to bottlenecks in the healthcare delivery processes. Fujitsu used similar approaches to tackle Japan’s healthcare needs that it had previously successfully used in other domains. These involved what Inomata called “green shared mobility” on a U.K. island, EV charging stations in India, and traffic in Pittsburgh.
 
Leveraging lessons learned from those engagements and seeing the applicability of digital twins beyond the confines of the physical world, Fujitsu conceived the Policy Twin. Using its Policy Twin, Fujitsu helps public sector clients recreate new policies from policies generated from the clients’ existing policy documents, and, critically, according to Inomata, allows for a “Digital Rehearsal” that can be used to verify the effectiveness and impact of policies in advance, based on real-world data. He added that the policy twin approach helped Fujitsu “solve social challenges … by understanding human behavior and social movements through Social Digital Twin.” Policymakers at any level could, with Fujitsu’s help, test variations of policies and evaluate the outcomes using Policy Twin, calibrating the scenarios based on desired outcomes, all before actually implementing any changes.

Policy Twin success story

Inomata outlined a few critical components for successful implementation of digital twins in a nonphysical world:

• Fujitsu uses a logic model for running simulations, but the reference policies should be coming from the same business or framework. Fujitsu’s Policy Twin approach, for example, could not use policies in public health to digitally rehearse tax policies.
• Policies must be machine-readable, which typically is not an issue as all public policies are publicly available. The challenge, of course, comes when policies are unclear, inexact, contradictory, or understood but not written down.
• Fujitsu’s approach must begin with understanding the underlying social issues. Similar to consulting and technology engagements, implementations succeed when directed at specific business problems. Fujitsu’s Policy Twin works best when the stakeholders, including Fujitsu, have clearly defined problems and desired outcomes.

Inomata and his team described the example of Fujitsu’s work with Japan’s Tsuda University around preventive medicine approaches and cost savings that were attributable to the use of Policy Twin technologies. Practically, Inomata walked through a recent project on how the local government was able to reduce expenses and improve the overall population health by using Policy Twin to create optimal policies around clinic visits. The Fujitsu presentation noted developed policy options of the preventive medical engagement that could reduce medical costs and improve health outcomes significantly after only one year post-implementation. Additionally, the Fujitsu presentation projected developed policy options that double both cost savings and health outcome improvements in preventive healthcare trial.
 
Fujitsu’s presentation also set ambitious targets for 2025 and 2026, noting that the Policy Twin approach could be applied to societal problems such as “service restructuring to address workforce shortages, disaster prevention and mitigation, and enhancing supply chain resilience.” Inomata also confirmed that the company intends to put the Policy Twin approach under the Uvance Wayfinders umbrella.

Fujitsu shows how technology can be used to benefit society

Applying digital twins to the nonphysical world — and to an inherently political part of the nonphysical world — takes courage and conviction, which are not attributes TBR typically writes about when covering IT services and technology companies. As Figure 1 from Fujitsu shows, the company does not lack for ambition: “Technology to predict future and design society.” Critically, in TBR’s view, Fujitsu will scale its Policy Twin initiative within the embrace of Uvance.
 
As TBR reported last year about the company’s strategy, “Fujitsu will focus on technology consulting, rather than McKinsey-style business consulting, playing to Fujitsu’s legacy technology strengths. In TBR’s view, technology-led consulting reflects the current demand among enterprise consulting buyers to infuse every consulting engagement with technology, a trend well underway before the hype began around generative AI. Fujitsu’s leaders added that Uvance Wayfinders — essentially business and technology consultants — are able to pull together all of Fujitsu’s capabilities and offerings.”
 
Stepping back from the specifics of Policy Twin and its place within Fujitsu, the overall approach of bringing data-driven, digital twin-enabled “digital rehearsals” to public policy strikes TBR as a substantial positive societal contribution, rooted firmly in Fujitsu’s technology legacy, capabilities and innovations. TBR will be watching closely to see which societal challenges Fujitsu takes on next.
 

 
Definitions of terms

• Social Digital Twin: Fujitsu’s proprietary digital twin technologies
• Policy Twin: A core technology within Social Digital Twin
• Digital twins: general digital twin technology