September 02, 2025
CIC Tokyo’s Victor Mulas helps startups thrive
Hub connects innovators with investors, companies here and abroad
- Name: Victor Mulas
- Title: Chief Innovation Officer, Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC)
- URL: https://jp.cic.com/en/cic-tokyo/
- Hometown: Madrid, Spain
- Years in Japan: 4
When the Cambridge Innovation Center opened its initial Asian base in Tokyo in 2020, it created a community designed to help startups thrive. CIC was founded in 1999 in Massachusetts to build such hubs connecting innovators with investors and companies.
Victor Mulas, the chief innovation officer of CIC, speaks with palpable pride about the base in Toranomon Hills. “CIC introduced the first large-scale shared space connected to international networks in Japan, offering expert support across domestic and overseas markets,” he said.
CIC Tokyo now hosts over 340 clients, with emerging ventures from around the world working alongside larger firms and government offices, highlighting Tokyo’s rising profile as a global center for new business.
Transformational tools
An avid reader since his childhood in Spain, books sparked one of Mulas’ earliest connections to Japan. A title that left a strong impression was the Spanish edition of “Natsukashii Toshi e no Tegami,” a semi-autobiographical work by Kenzaburo Oe from 1987 that explores post-World War II Japanese society. (There is no English edition.)
Mulas moved to the United States as a young adult, where he joined the World Bank as an innovation specialist in information and communication technology. “I worked on programs exploring how transformational tools could support developing countries. My task was to identify such approaches, test them and, if successful, help scale them,” he explained.
His work also focused on building ecosystems for sharing knowledge. He notes that the term “ecosystem” is borrowed from biology, denoting a complex web of interactions, such as in the Amazon. “Innovation is about knowledge flows, and it has to be sustainable,” he said.
Meeting the world in Japan
Mulas came to Japan in 2020 with the World Bank as head of the Tokyo Development Learning Center, a partnership between the World Bank and the government of Japan. “Its mission was to share the country’s best practices with others,” he noted. “These systems are some of the finest in the world, and my role was to bring delegations here to learn and then share these lessons globally.”
He arrived just as Japan was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Mulas says became a catalyst for change: “Businesses adapted, and people began cooperating in new ways, creating fresh systems of collaboration here.” Mulas branched out into consulting and advisory roles with governmental, private and academic institutions.
Joining CIC was a natural progression, aligning with his experience and vision. He connected with CIC while still at the World Bank, after authoring a report on Tokyo’s startup ecosystem. His report included Venture Cafe, a nonprofit organization that supported early-stage entrepreneurs and is part of CIC.
“After stepping away from the World Bank, I wanted to support the country’s startup landscape,” Mulas said. “The potential here was exciting and reminded me of New York in 2010, in the Lehman shock era. There was world-class science and research, some of the best anywhere, but it was not being fully leveraged internationally.”
Fukuoka — a new global hub
While Tokyo seems a natural choice for the first Asian center for CIC, the recent opening of a second center in Fukuoka in June might seem surprising. However, Mulas says it was an obvious step.
“Fukuoka has long been at the forefront of new business creation in Japan. The city is young and dynamic, with a culture of entrepreneurship and regulatory sandboxes — controlled environments where companies can test business models. They even have a concierge system dedicated to helping startups,” he pointed out, adding that Fukuoka is also one of the few cities in Japan where the population is actually growing.
Mulas emphasizes that large corporations must adjust their mindsets and learn to work effectively with entrepreneurs if they want open collaboration strategies to succeed in tackling major challenges. He says that innovation is spread across many regions, and companies should look well beyond Silicon Valley to find the right partners.
“The key is creating systems that are sustainable locally and can reach critical mass with talent. Cities like Fukuoka show how this can be done. Japan has opportunities but must continue shaping its networks of collaboration in its own way,” he said.
The future is already here
Asked about his goals for the future, Mulas smiled. “It is already happening! Meeting leading creative minds from around the world and bringing them together. We are asking them, ‘How can we help you develop faster?’” As one example, he mentioned the Advanced Research and Invention Agency in the U.K., which is working on biotechnology and better interfaces between minds and computers.
Mulas is also nurturing young people in his team, helping them grow and preparing them to operate across borders. His team is global with presence in Japan, the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands ,Germany and the Gulf. “Japan has impressive scientific expertise that has largely remained local. The next step is to take it abroad, to elevate it globally — and that is part of my mission,” he said.
In closing, Mulas shared two mottoes that have guided him to this point. “Don’t ever stop dreaming. It brings out your inner child, and the best innovators tend to be big dreamers. And don’t ever stop believing. I often tell people in Japan that they should believe in themselves more.” He also mentioned Leonardo da Vinci, the “original innovator” whose boundless curiosity and imagination serve as inspiration for how he approaches the world.
