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

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology

Object-oriented analysis

Management of the enterprise architecture has become increasingly recognized as a crucial part of both business and IT management. Still, a common understanding and methodological consistency seems far from being developed. Acknowledging the significant role of research in moving the development process along, this article employs different bibliometric methods, complemented by an extensive qualitative interpretation of the research field, to provide a unique overview of the enterprise architecture literature. After answering our research questions about the collaboration via co-authorships, the intellectual structure of the research field and its most influential works, and the principal themes of research, we propose an agenda for future research based on the findings from the above analyses and their comparison to empirical insights from the literature. In particular, our study finds a considerable degree of co-authorship clustering and a positive impact of the extent of co-authorship on the diffusion of works on enterprise architecture. In addition, this article identifies three major research streams and shows that research to date has revolved around specific themes, while some of high practical relevance receive minor attention. Hence, the contribution of our study is manifold and offers support for researchers and practitioners alike.

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An Exploration of Enterprise Architecture Research

This thesis presents a development method that supports enterprise architects in systematically designing an organization-specific enterprise architecture (EA) management function. The development method builds on a method base, consisting of interrelated method building blocks (MBB) extracted from practice-proven approaches. The development method guides an organization in incrementally designing an EA management function by completing the activities with algorithmically identified MBBs suitable for the given organizational context and the specific problem. The development method employs a catalog of organizational context descriptions relevant for the design of the EA management function, supplies techniques to ensure operational implementability, and provides guidelines for adapting existing EA management functions in response to changing organizational contexts and problems.

Developing Organization-Specific Enterprise Architecture Management Functions Using a Method Base

Cross-sectoral collaboration of organisations is a crucial factor in the development and production of knowledge-intensive products, processes and services. Within dynamic, loosely coupled networks, problem-oriented and flexible combination of core competences facilitates the conjoint exploration and exploitation of knowledge to secure and to increase competitiveness in turbulent markets. While strategic aspects of cross-sectoral collaboration in such networks are extensively covered in research, implementation in industrial practice is often hampered by lack of methodological support to systematically transform strategic considerations into operative work. This paper presents a framework for collaborative development and production, consisting of a structural model and a process model which will support the operative work in networks all along the product and/or service life-cycle. The applicability of the framework is shown in examples from the European research projects AVALON and SmartNets.

SmartNet collaboration model - a framework for collaborative development and production

Innovative, knowledge-intensive products are essential for companies to stay competitive in a globalised market. For the development of such products, small and medium-sized enterprises combine their core competences and resources in dynamic, loosely coupled networks. The basis for efficient and robust production of the newly developed subject can already be provided in the early phases of such collaboration. However, a continuous manufacturing process can only be achieved by a conscious and guided transformation from development network to production chain. This paper presents an approach from the European research project SmartNets to control and support this transformation methodologically and technologically, considering not only the organizational perspective, but also information and communication technologies, and knowledge aspects. A case study will illustrate how the transformation could be implemented in one of the project’s industrial networks.

From Collaborative Development to Manufacturing in Production Networks: The SmartNets Approach

With the growing complexity of products and processes in a globalizedmarket, companies are required to strive for a new quality of partnership. In SmartNetworks, networking of partners goes beyond mere organizational networking, butinvolves also networking on the levels of knowledge and information/communicationtechnology (ICT). The setup of ICT networking in newly formed Smart Networks re-quires not only information about already existing ICT infrastructure, but also a clearunderstanding of the organizational interconnections and knowledge interdependen-cies. This paper presents how the respective knowledge can be identiﬁed, visualized,and structured through information models in order to obtain decision support for theintroduction of additional ICT support for the collaboration within a Smart Network. 1 Introduction This article gives a short introduction on the management topic of Smart Networks andshows, how enterprise architecture (EA) management methods and patterns can be appliedto this kind of networks – especially to its ICT parts. A Smart Network in this contextis an organizational structure spanning different enterprises (manufacturers and serviceproviders), which has been formed to pursue a business opportunity. A conjoint goalcould e.g. be the collaborative manufacturing of products or collaborative innovation.Smart Networks are in their understanding of collaboration strongly oriented towards threeconstituting features as characterized by Filos [Fil06]:Organizational networking refers to the strong interconnection of organizations in het-erarchical structures and business processes, which are designed and optimized together.Knowledge networking lays the base for organizational networking, by establishing ef-fective exchange of knowledge. Each partner will have access to relevant knowledge forthe different collaborative tasks to be performed at any time.

EA Management Patterns for Smart Networks.

Small and medium-sized enterprises collaborate with partners to develop highly innovative and knowledgeintensive products. Collaboration models describe in detail how this goal can be achieved. These models can be supported by an implemented and executable version thereof. This paper describes an implementation of a collaboration model from the European research project SmartNets using an automated interpretation of artifacts. We explain the collaboration model, describe the implementation and evaluate our proposed solution by means of an example from one of the projects industrial networks.

Supporting Collaborative Product Development through Automated Interpretation of Artifacts

Staying competitive in dynamic and globalized markets is one of the main challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For coping with this challenge, collaboration with partners is an essential success factor. In the resulting networks, SMEs share risks to conjointly develop innovative products by combining resources and their core competences. Even though fundamental research and also industrial best practices prove the value of collaboration for innovation, there is still a lack in efficiency and effectiveness within SME networks. As a consequence, methodological and technological support for the management of collaborative activities and in particular the immanent diversity within development networks is needed. Based on a recently developed holistic collaboration model, which describes the structural and procedural foundation for innovation in networks, this paper presents methods and tools to successfully manage the diversity of SME networks especially in context of their evolution from development towards production. Thus, this paper further elaborates on the overall Smart Networking concept known from former publications and contributes newly developed methods and tools for managing diversity of collaborative innovation projects.

Armin Lau

Papers

SmartNet collaboration model - a framework for collaborative development and production

From Collaborative Development to Manufacturing in Production Networks: The SmartNets Approach

EA Management Patterns for Smart Networks.

Supporting Collaborative Product Development through Automated Interpretation of Artifacts

Managing diversity of collaborative innovation projects