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

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The Rise of the Creative Class

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Models that depict innovation as a smooth, well-behaved linear process badly misspecify the nature and direction of the causal factors at work. Innovation is complex, uncertain, somewhat disorderly, and subject to changes of many sorts. Innovation is also difficult to measure and demands close coordination of adequate technical knowledge and excellent market judgment in order to satisfy economic, technological, and other types of constraints—all simultaneously. The process of innovation must be viewed as a series of changes in a complete system not only of hardware, but also of market environment, production facilities and knowledge, and the social contexts of the innovation organization.

An Overview of Innovation

In the beginning of the 1990s, Singapore’s government identified the local production of global knowledge as field of action that shall assure sustainable future economic and social development. This focus appears plausible when looking at the factors of production that – besides knowledge – Singapore can offer. As a small country with less than 4m inhabitants, little land and labour is available. Consequently, the Singaporean government decided to focus on knowledge and money as the factors of production that are increasingly regarded as responsible for the creation of wealth by members of the international scientific community. Besides others, the management guru Peter F. Drucker expressed this belief in the economic strength of knowledge by stating: “the central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses, not ‘labour’…Value is now created by ‘productivity’ and ‘innovation’, both applications of knowledge to work” (Drucker, 1994: 8). This paper attempts to outline this push towards knowledge production and the positioning of Singapore as a knowledge hub in the Straits of Malacca initiated by the Singaporean government. The paper is divided into, first, grasping the dominant definitions of knowledge in Singapore and second, redrawing the government activities towards increased knowledge production, which is hoped to ensure long-term economic stability and growth.

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Singapore: The knowledge hub in the straits of Malacca

In 2008, the research project on Sustainable Management of Land and Water Resources in Khorezm/Uzbekistan at the Center for Development Research, Germany initiated a participatory approach to innovation development and diffusion with local stakeholders Selected agricultural innovations, developed by the project and identified as ‘plausible promises’, are since then tested and modified accordingly by teams of researchers, local farmers and water users This paper discusses the challenges faced in this process of joint experimentation and learning between researchers and local stakeholders whose behaviours, attitudes and actions are heavily shaped by the local context, academic discipline and hierarchical culture of knowledge governance

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/88376/1/605235813.pdf

'Follow the innovation': A joint experimentation and learning approach to transdisciplinary innovation research

World history has known areas of relative isolation and areas of high intensity of cultural interaction. The Mediterranean Sea, the Silk Road or the Straits of Malacca can be cited as such crucial contact zones. Within these areas, centers sprung up that served as interfaces between cultures and societies. These “hubs” as we would like to call them, emerged at various points throughout the contact zones, rose to prominence and submerged into oblivion due to a variety of natural calamities or political fortunes. This paper assesses the rise and fall of trade and knowledge hubs along the Straits of Malacca from before colonialisation until today. Historical hubs of maritime trade and religiosity today increasingly establish themselves as educational and knowledge hubs. This leads us to speak of the Straits of Malacca as a chain of – not pearls – but knowledge hubs with Singapore as the knowledge hub in the region shining the brightest of all, as the data suggest. We aim to conceptually grasp this development by suggesting a model or at least a hypothesis about the rise and movement of knowledge hubs in general.

Knowledge Hubs Along the Straits of Malacca

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/88320/1/772558590.pdf

Rethinking water management in Khorezm, Uzbekistan: Concepts and recommendations

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/88286/1/77278048X.pdf

Anna-Katharina Hornidge

Papers

Singapore: The knowledge hub in the straits of Malacca

'Follow the innovation': A joint experimentation and learning approach to transdisciplinary innovation research

Knowledge Hubs Along the Straits of Malacca

Rethinking water management in Khorezm, Uzbekistan: Concepts and recommendations

The Reinvention of Agricultural Service Organisations in Uzbekistan - a Machine-Tractor Park in the Khorezm Region.