NEC Corporation and the University of Tokyo recently announced the commencement of a comprehensive industry-academia alliance for strengthening innovation in Japan. This alliance differs from others in that it has been created under an organization-to-organization agreement to promote comprehensive collaboration, including the sharing of visions and issues from the fundamental research phase to the commercialization of research results phase, the consideration of social acceptance of research results, and the development of human resources for the future. Among the first actions by this industry-academia alliance for innovation will be considering the magnitude of the impact of AI on society, to conclude the NEC/University of Tokyo Partnership Agreement for Future AI Research and Education in the field of Strategic Artificial Intelligence (AI), and to commence specific activities. Conventional industry-academia alliances have only engaged in limited, small-scale joint research related to individual technologies. However, in order to strengthen Japan's innovation and promote meaningful social changes, it will be imperative to carry out investigations on implications for ethics and legal systems with a focus on commercialization, as well as to create new collaborative alliances that are large in scale and cover broad areas, including human resource development.