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 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

A literature and practice review to develop sustainable business model archetypes

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

A Product-Service System (PSS) is an integrated combination of products and services. This Western concept embraces a service-led competitive strategy, environmental sustainability, and the basis to differentiate from competitors who simply offer lower priced products. This paper aims to report the state-of-the-art of PSS research by presenting a clinical review of literature currently available on this topic. The literature is classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed. On this basis, this paper defines the PSS concept, reports on its origin and features, gives examples of applications along with potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarizes available tools and methodologies, and identifies future research challenges.

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State-of-the-art in product-service systems

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system solutions are currently in high demand by both manufacturing and service organisations because they provide a tightly integrated solution to an organisation's information system needs. During the last decade, ERP systems have received a significant amount of attention from researchers and practitioners from a variety of functional disciplines. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the research literature (1990‐2003) concerning ERP systems is presented. The literature is further classified and the major outcomes of each study are addressed and analysed. Following a comprehensive review of the literature, proposals for future research are formulated to identify topics where fruitful opportunities exist.

Enterprise resource planning: An integrative review

Purpose – This paper aims to present a framework that will help manufacturing firms to configure their internal production and support operations to enable effective and efficient delivery of products and their closely associated services. Design/methodology/approach – First, the key definitions and literature sources directly associated with servitization of manufacturing are established. Then, a theoretical framework that categorises the key characteristics of a manufacturer's operations strategy is developed and this is populated using both evidence from the extant literature and empirical data. Findings – The framework captures a set of operations principles, structures and processes that can guide a manufacturer in the delivery of product-centric servitized offering. These are illustrated and contrasted against operations that deliver purely product (production operations) and those which deliver purely services (services operations). Research limitations/implications – The work is based on a review of the literature supported by data collected from an exploratory case study. Whilst it provides an essential platform, further research will be needed to validate the framework. Originality/value – The principal contribution of this paper is a framework that captures the key characteristics of operations for product-centric servitized manufacture.

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Towards an operations strategy for product-centric servitization

This research work aims to develop an intelligent knowledge-based system that accomplishes an environment to assist inexperienced users to estimate the manufacturing cost modelling of a product at the conceptual design stage of the product life cycle. Therefore, a quicker response to customers’ expectations is generated. This paper discusses the development process of the proposed system for cost modelling of machining processes. It embodies a CAD solid modelling system, user interface, material selection, process/machine selection, and cost estimation techniques. The main function of the system, besides estimating the product cost, is to generate initial process planning includes generation and selection of machining processes, their sequence and their machining parameters. Therefore, the developed system differs from conventional product cost estimating systems, in that it is structured to support concurrent engineering. Manufacturing knowledge is represented by hybrid knowledge representation techniques, such as production rules, frames and object oriented. To handle the uncertainty in cost estimation model that cannot be addressed by traditional analytical methods, a fuzzy logic-based knowledge representation is implemented in the developed system. Based on the analysis of product life cycle, the estimated cost included material, processing, machine set-up and non-productive costs. A case study is discussed and demonstrated to validate the proposed system.

Manufacturing cost modelling for concurrent product development

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an integrative and detailed review of the critical factors that cause enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation failures, based on an in‐depth literature review (1997‐2009).Design/methodology/approach – Keywords relating to the subject of this paper were defined, and used to search web engines and journal databases for papers on ERP implementation failures. These papers were further analysed and classified into various categories.Findings – Nine factors are found to be critical in the failure of ERP implementations: excessive customisation, dilemma of internal integration, poor understanding of business implications and requirements, lack of change management, poor data quality, misalignment of IT with business, hidden costs, limited training and lack of top management support.Research limitations/implications – The paper proposes the development of a framework to address each ERP implementation failure factor in its entirety based on the frequency...

Essam Shehab

Papers

State-of-the-art in product-service systems

Enterprise resource planning: An integrative review

Towards an operations strategy for product-centric servitization

Manufacturing cost modelling for concurrent product development

Challenges in enterprise resource planning implementation: state‐of‐the‐art