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

This article examines the function of documents as a data source in qualitative research and discusses document analysis procedure in the context of actual research experiences. Targeted to research novices, the article takes a nuts‐and‐bolts approach to document analysis. It describes the nature and forms of documents, outlines the advantages and limitations of document analysis, and offers specific examples of the use of documents in the research process. The application of document analysis to a grounded theory study is illustrated.

Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method

Social Network Analysis

The circular economy concept has gained momentum both among scholars and practitioners. However, critics claim that it means many different things to different people. This paper provides further evidence for these critics. The aim of this paper is to create transparency regarding the current understandings of the circular economy concept. For this purpose, we have gathered 114 circular economy definitions which were coded on 17 dimensions. Our findings indicate that the circular economy is most frequently depicted as a combination of reduce, reuse and recycle activities, whereas it is oftentimes not highlighted that CE necessitates a systemic shift. We further find that the definitions show few explicit linkages of the circular economy concept to sustainable development. The main aim of the circular economy is considered to be economic prosperity, followed by environmental quality; its impact on social equity and future generations is barely mentioned. Furthermore, neither business models nor consumers are frequently outlined as enablers of the circular economy. We critically discuss the various circular economy conceptualizations throughout this paper. Overall, we hope to contribute via this study towards the coherence of the circular economy concept; we presume that significantly varying circular economy definitions may eventually result in the collapse of the concept.

Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning.

Engineering Design Thinking, Teaching, and Learning

Effect of misaligned loads on beams with a height constraint

Longer lifecycles and a shifting industrial focus from simple product delivery to through-life support have increased the need to retain organisational knowledge for the duration of product lifecycles and beyond. This fragmentation of work across time and organizations buries organizational understanding of design processes and of the underpinning design rationale in many disparate representations. Further, existing report-based documentary practices tend to omit key information which could compromise an engineer’s ability to comprehend and reuse this information in addition to requiring significant additional authoring work. Emerging approaches to documentation are discussed and compared as cognitive technologies in a snowmobile drive shaft example. One design episode is assisted by interactively documenting decisions in an IBIS-based tool whose output forms the design record. The other is passively documented via an activity-modelling approach and media-enhanced records (MEMS). This work provides examples on situating discussions about engineering design documentation practices and describes improvements for further development and testing of both the activity-modelling and media-enhanced records and the IBIS-based approaches.

Comparing and integrating methods of design activity documentation across synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaborative work

Lessons Learnt from Experts in DesignRationale Knowledge Capture

International Design Conference - Design 2006, Dubrovnik

Higher education is today subjected to an unprecedented range of pressures including increasing student numbers, financial constraints, changing technologies and demand for new skills This paper explores opportunities for performance improvement in response to these pressures Conventional approaches to productivity improvement are outlined and their opportunity for application in academia assessed It is concluded that new IT-based teaching methods, economies of scale and waste reduction through lean thinking may be applicable, but only if the limitations of the small size of academic units can be overcome In the absence of a market mechanism it is proposed that this may be achieved through collaborationCopyright © 2006 by ASME

Chris McMahon

Papers

Effect of misaligned loads on beams with a height constraint

Comparing and integrating methods of design activity documentation across synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaborative work

Lessons Learnt from Experts in DesignRationale Knowledge Capture

International Design Conference - Design 2006, Dubrovnik

Opportunities for Improvement in Teaching Performance Through Collaboration