How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

House of Quality

The effectiveness of a sales promotion can be examined by decomposing the sales “bump” during the promotion period into sales increase due to brand switching, purchase time acceleration, and stockp...

Impact of Sales Promotions on when, what, and how Much to Buy:

Quality function deployment: A literature review

Big data analytics in logistics and supply chain management: Certain investigations for research and applications

Purpose: This study investigates career aspirations and preferences of members of the “Millenial” generation which are relevant to study their career choices and how decisions are made. Career aspirations have an impact on career decisions and evaluations of one’s own career (Derr, 1986; Derr & Laurent, 1989). These subjective career orientations are the product of one’s “motives, values, talents, and personal constraints” (Chompookum & Derr, 2004: 409). Thus, internal career orientations serve as principles for individual career choices, career desires and perspectives (Chompookum & Derr, 2004). Generally, career decision making process is complex and contextual factors are relevant for occupational choice based on factors like expected salary and prestige (Betz, Heesacker, & Shuttleworth, 1990; Nauta, Epperson, & Kahn, 1998; Ng et al., 2010). Design/Methodology: Empirically, this study looks at the perception of contextual factors like job characteristics and attributes. Survey was conducted with students from an Austrian University (n=370). The data were analysed utilizing mapping procedures and choice based con-joint analysis and simulations of different job scenarios. Results: Study participants placed an importance on the factors working climate, and opportunities for advancement, meaningful work experience, work-life balance. There is a popularity of certain job offers in relation to specializations during university education. Limitations: Cross-sectional design that includes job preferences for conducting a con-joint analysis. Research Practice/Implications: Perception of job characteristics and attributes have consequences for organizations. Originality/Value: Analysing career aspirations and preferred job characteristics using con-joint analysis and simulations.

Symposium on the complexity of career decisions: Career aspirations and job preferences. Contextualizing career choices.

The Evaluation of European Cities' Tourism Offices' Web Sites

We study the effects of various incentive schemes on the learning behavior of teams in an artificial factory. Modeling the new product development process, we demonstrate, how production and marketing agents learn to coordinate their actions in order to produce the optimal product with respect to their incentive schemes. As a coordinating mechanism between marketing and production, we use the House of Quality Framework of H.J.R. Hauser and D. Clausing (1988). The House of Quality methodology, which is used by real firms, contains important information from marketing and production. It is a procedure that facilitates the search for new, promising (from market perspective), and feasible products (from a production/design perspective). We found that the House of Quality approach yields higher life cycle returns than the traditional search for new products, especially for a low number of search steps. This is an important finding recommending the application of the House of Quality since the number of search steps directly influences time to market. Thus, minimizing the number of steps could be an important competitive advantage in today's fast moving consumer markets.

/pdf/learning-in-the-artificial-factory-4ar2xpne8x.pdf

Learning in the artificial factory

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-642-55457-5_21.pdf

Wie geht es weiter mit der IT-Industrie?

We introduce the Effective Number of Issues measure for e-participation efficiency. This novel index is based on the Shannon entropy measure of biodiversity and summarizes the amount of information gained through an e-participation project in one number. This makes the comparison between different e-participation projects straightforward and lays the foundation for the rigorous analysis of success factors of e-participation projects in a data-driven way. After providing the formula and rationale for the new measure we use the ENI index to benchmark the idea generation process for the digital agenda Vienna against other projects. It turns out that the efficiency of this project is significantly higher than those observed for other cases. We conjecture that this can be attributed to the user-friendly design of the software platform and the effective communication strategy of the process management. Finally, suggestions for further research are given. (authors' abstract)

Alfred Taudes

Papers

Symposium on the complexity of career decisions: Career aspirations and job preferences. Contextualizing career choices.

The Evaluation of European Cities' Tourism Offices' Web Sites

Learning in the artificial factory

Wie geht es weiter mit der IT-Industrie?

Evaluation of E-Participation Efficiency with Biodiversity Measures - the Case of the Digital Agenda Vienna