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

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Rapid advances in industrialisation and informatisation methods have spurred tremendous progress in developing the next generation of manufacturing technology. Today, we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In 2013, amongst one of 10 ‘Future Projects’ identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan, the Industry 4.0 project is considered to be a major endeavour for Germany to establish itself as a leader of integrated industry. In 2014, China’s State Council unveiled their ten-year national plan, Made-in-China 2025, which was designed to transform China from the world’s workshop into a world manufacturing power. Made-in-China 2025 is an initiative to comprehensively upgrade China’s industry including the manufacturing sector. In Industry 4.0 and Made-in-China 2025, many applications require a combination of recently emerging new technologies, which is giving rise to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Such technologies originate from different disciplines ...

Industry 4.0: state of the art and future trends

Over the last few years, the fourth industrial revolution has attracted more and more attentions all around the world. In the current literature, there is still a lack of efforts to systematically review the state of the art of this new industrial revolution wave. The aim of this study is to address this gap by investigating the academic progresses in Industry 4.0. A systematic literature review was carried out to analyse the academic articles within the Industry 4.0 topic that were published online until the end of June 2016. In this paper, the obtained results from both the general data analysis of included papers (e.g. relevant journals, their subject areas and categories, conferences, keywords) and the specific data analysis corresponding to four research sub-questions are illustrated and discussed. These results not only summarise the current research activities (e.g. main research directions, applied standards, employed software and hardware), but also indicate existing deficiencies and potential re...

Past, present and future of Industry 4.0 - a systematic literature review and research agenda proposal

Manufacturing industry profoundly impact economic and societal progress. As being a commonly accepted term for research centers and universities, the Industry 4.0 initiative has received a splendid attention of the business and research community. Although the idea is not new and was on the agenda of academic research in many years with different perceptions, the term “Industry 4.0” is just launched and well accepted to some extend not only in academic life but also in the industrial society as well. While academic research focuses on understanding and defining the concept and trying to develop related systems, business models and respective methodologies, industry, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the change of industrial machine suits and intelligent products as well as potential customers on this progress. It is therefore important for the companies to primarily understand the features and content of the Industry 4.0 for potential transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. In order to achieve a successful transformation, they should clearly review their positions and respective potentials against basic requirements set forward for Industry 4.0 standard. This will allow them to generate a well-defined road map. There has been several approaches and discussions going on along this line, a several road maps are already proposed. Some of those are reviewed in this paper. However, the literature clearly indicates the lack of respective assessment methodologies. Since the implementation and applications of related theorems and definitions outlined for the 4th industrial revolution is not mature enough for most of the reel life implementations, a systematic approach for making respective assessments and evaluations seems to be urgently required for those who are intending to speed this transformation up. It is now main responsibility of the research community to developed technological infrastructure with physical systems, management models, business models as well as some well-defined Industry 4.0 scenarios in order to make the life for the practitioners easy. It is estimated by the experts that the Industry 4.0 and related progress along this line will have an enormous effect on social life. As outlined in the introduction, some social transformation is also expected. It is assumed that the robots will be more dominant in manufacturing, implanted technologies, cooperating and coordinating machines, self-decision-making systems, autonom problem solvers, learning machines, 3D printing etc. will dominate the production process. Wearable internet, big data analysis, sensor based life, smart city implementations or similar applications will be the main concern of the community. This social transformation will naturally trigger the manufacturing society to improve their manufacturing suits to cope with the customer requirements and sustain competitive advantage. A summary of the potential progress along this line is reviewed in introduction of the paper. It is so obvious that the future manufacturing systems will have a different vision composed of products, intelligence, communications and information network. This will bring about new business models to be dominant in industrial life. Another important issue to take into account is that the time span of this so-called revolution will be so short triggering a continues transformation process to yield some new industrial areas to emerge. This clearly puts a big pressure on manufacturers to learn, understand, design and implement the transformation process. Since the main motivation for finding the best way to follow this transformation, a comprehensive literature review will generate a remarkable support. This paper presents such a review for highlighting the progress and aims to help improve the awareness on the best experiences. It is intended to provide a clear idea for those wishing to generate a road map for digitizing the respective manufacturing suits. By presenting this review it is also intended to provide a hands-on library of Industry 4.0 to both academics as well as industrial practitioners. The top 100 headings, abstracts and key words (i.e. a total of 619 publications of any kind) for each search term were independently analyzed in order to ensure the reliability of the review process. Note that, this exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity. It seems that these principles have taken the attention of the scientists to carry out more variety of research on the subject and to develop implementable and appropriate scenarios. A comprehensive taxonomy of Industry 4.0 can also be developed through analyzing the results of this review.

Literature review of Industry 4.0 and related technologies

The Impact of Intellectual Capital on Organizational Performance

Service Provision in the Framework of Industry 4.0

The present paper proposes a preliminary business model for collaboration between universities and industrial partners (through projects). Imperatives and dimensions of this model are the analysis result of data obtained by observation applied to public information and market research. The study was conducted nationwide. This model is the companies’ response to market demand. This model proposes a general framework for the creation of successful collaboration between universities and businesses. The industrial partners do not necessarily have all the competencies to perform each operation in-house for the development of competitive products. Therefore, collaboration with universities helps them in researching the problems that cannot be solved individually. In this sense, universities could be considered as partners for industries. The analysis undertaken shows that how the two entities, the university and industry collaborate, very much fits with the framework for collaboration shown. Although the open innovation model does not apply significantly and primarily in these entities, there is a high potential for its implementation and the creation of added value.

Business Model for the University-industry Collaboration in Open Innovation☆

In the knowledge-based society, universities have re-considered the traditional academic roles, and placed them in a broader context as part of its new role in promoting innovation. Based on existing models there has been developed a framework to analyze how universities support their implication and contribution to local economic development. The proposed approach refers to the university-industry collaboration (UIC) based on the knowledge transfer processes in order to increase their contributions, and influence the socio-economic development at the local level. The framework was represented as an ontology consist of five dimensions and 57 relevant items for potential UIC that were described in order to facilitate the decision-making process when establishing a particular type of contract or project. The main ideas debates in the article are related to the new role of the university in the knowledge-based society; knowledge and innovation transfer processes; the UIC ontology design and development.

A Knowledge Management Approach for The University-industry Collaboration in Open Innovation

The continuous optimization of business processes is still a challenge for companies. In times of digital transformation, faster changing internal and external framework conditions and new customer expectations for fastest delivery and best quality of goods and many more, companies should set up their internal process at the best way. But what to do if framework conditions changed unexpectedly? The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the digital transformation will impact the Business Process Management (BPM) while using methods like machine learning or artificial intelligence. Therefore, the core components will be explained, compared and set up in relation. To identify application areas interviews and analysis will be held up with digital companies. The finding of the paper will be recommendation for action in the field of BPM and process optimization through machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Approach of optimizing and management processes via machine learning and artificial intelligence will support companies to decide which tool will be the best for automated BPM.

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Anca Draghici

Papers

The Impact of Intellectual Capital on Organizational Performance

Service Provision in the Framework of Industry 4.0

Business Model for the University-industry Collaboration in Open Innovation☆

A Knowledge Management Approach for The University-industry Collaboration in Open Innovation

Automated business process management – in times of digital transformation using machine learning or artificial intelligence