Mindware LLC was founded by Kunihiro Tada to develop the ThinkNavi and ConceptMiner products. In the 1980s, he worked at a major Japanese consulting firm, researching new business opportunities in the high-tech sector. Based on that experience, he advocated “concept research” in the 1990s, stating that “true innovation requires more than fact-finding; it also requires questioning existing concepts.” He focused on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and Bayesian belief networks (BNNs) as technical tools for concept research, and launched Viscovery SOMin in 2000 and Hugin in 2003 in the Japanese market. Advances in large-scale language models (LLMs) made it possible to vectorize natural language text and model it with machine learnning such as SOM. In 2025, he established the basic technology for the text conceptualization engine ConceptMiner, based on growing neural gas (GNG) and minimum spanning tree (MST). ThinkNavi is the first ConceptMiner application.
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Directions
Exit the east exit of JR Okayama Station, and across the main street (City Hall Street) you will see the Takashimaya department store. The building is next to it on the right. If you go down to the underground shopping mall (Ichibangai), you can get there directly from the station.