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

Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization

The article reviews the book “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy,” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

Relevance Communication And Cognition

Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal Tushman, Michael L. and O'Reilly, Charles A., 256 pp., Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. Reviewed by Subodh P. Kulkarni, Assistant Professor in School of Business at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Professors Tushman and O'Reilly are well known for their research on innovation and organizational culture. In this book, the authors address a fundamental and interesting issue underlying organizational change and innovation: that of how firms can achieve a balance between stability and change. Businesses are not likely to prosper or survive in the long run without this balance. One of the book's key premises is that short-term success may constrain a firm's ability to change. Short term successes often occur in larger, older, more structured organizations, the source of structural and cultural inertia, which yields success in stable environments and failure when environments change. Therefore, a company's culture holds the key to success (or failure) in the long run. To create and sustain a competitive edge in the long run, companies must learn how to manage incremental and revolutionary change. The key, according to the authors, is to develop an "ambidextrous organization." Tushman and O'Reilly define ambidextrous organizations as those having internally consistent structures and an internal operating culture that provides for excelling today, while also planning for the future. The ambidextrous organizations are, thus, engaged in a balancing act between the management of incremental and revolutionary technologies. Further, these organizations have very different cultures within a company (or even a business unit, for that matter). Vision is vital to ambidextrous organizations, often displaying one vision that hosts multiple cultures in the unit. Of course, a firm can have multiple cultures under one roof by spinning off different business units and managing them independently. This is unacceptable to the authors. It is important to manage them as a whole, or as a system. The thing that holds the system components together is the overarching vision for the technology firm. That is why the book emphasizes strategic intent or competitive vision; because without a common, overarching purpose and set of values, the ambidextrous company just does not hold together. So it is not only different cultures, but different structures, systems, rewards, and competencies that need to be managed together. Drawing on their extensive research, consulting practice, as well as the experiences of managers from several "ambidextrous companies," the authors develop a model that can be used by executives to understand the dynamics of change necessary for long-term success. Toward this end, the book provides several tools for identifying and diagnosing the causes of performance gaps and for developing action plans to attain, and maintain, industry leadership. The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 is introductory, and it outlines the concepts underlying the authors' model. Chapter 2 highlights the significance of the concepts introduced earlier in the context of global change and innovation. Chapters 3 through 6 focus on the building of capabilities, competencies, and cultures that can generate a sustainable competitive advantage. Chapter 4 develops a model that highlights the congruence among an organization's strategies and four distinct factors: critical tasks, culture, structure, and people. A lack of congruence often results in performance gaps. Chapter 5 outlines how organizational culture-the selecting, socializing, and rewarding of workers consistent with the company's goals-promotes this congruence. It also illustrates how to assesses an organization's culture. Chapters 7 and 8 stand out in particular because in these chapters the authors introduce techniques for building an ambidextrous organization. …

Winning through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal

Attempts to assess the quality of academic publications have been increasing lately. Due to the number of existing journals, it is hard to make a representative selection and to find criteria for determining quality. Hence, questions arise, including what sort of journals are more important in terms of reputation, readership frequency, and relevance to scientific research and practice. Recent studies on journal rankings have been carried out on the basis of both objective data (citation counts) and the quality perceptions of experts. This study attempts a rating of tourism and hospitality journals among the scientific community according to the journals’ readership frequency, scientific and practical relevance, overall reputation, and the importance of being published in the journals to the academic career of the respondents.

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A Ranking of International Tourism and Hospitality Journals

Sense of virtual community: A follow up on its measurement

Determinants of response to customer e-mail enquiries to hotels: evidence from Austria

Organisational culture is a decisive factor for a firm's innovativeness and performance. Our empirical model explores the relationship between organisational culture — based on the competing values model — as an antecedent of exploration and exploitation, innovation success and firm performance. It is tested on a sample of 232 CEOs of corporations in the US. Relationships between the constructs were analysed through path modelling, using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method, employing the SmartPLS software. The results reveal a strong influence of corporate culture on exploration and exploitation, innovation success and performance. More specifically, we find significant positive relationships between hierarchy culture and market culture and exploitation. A clan culture negatively impacts exploration. Only an adhocracy culture positively influences both exploitation and exploration. Exploration and exploitation are positively related to innovation success and firm performance. Theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and an agenda for further research are discussed.

Corporate culture as an antecedent of successful exploration and exploitation

SUMMARY The Alps are the focus of a wide-ranging discussion. Researchers, scientists, politicians, inhabitants, and people who earn their living in the Alpine region are all confronted with difficult challenges. The main topics are the development in the fields of nature, landscape, tourism and leisure, traffic and transport, and its consequences for the Alps as a living space and economic area. About 30 years ago, a cooperation of tourism and political authorities in 11 countries, regions, provinces, and cantons of Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Austria has been established. Due to globalization and changing traveling patterns, people have become more and more aware that a new international cooperation of the Alpine tourism regions in the field of destination management and marketing is required. This is necessary in order to react to market changes accordingly. This acknowledgment is instead of small and more or less independent and self-sufficient organizations. It also includes the collaboration con...

Dagmar Abfalter

Papers

A Ranking of International Tourism and Hospitality Journals

Sense of virtual community: A follow up on its measurement

Determinants of response to customer e-mail enquiries to hotels: evidence from Austria

Corporate culture as an antecedent of successful exploration and exploitation

Cross-Border Destination Management Systems in the Alpine Region–The Role of Knowledge Networks on the Example of AlpNet