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

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

House of Quality

This study examined the effects of vision content, delivery and organizational performance on perceptions of leader charisma and effectiveness. Subjects included 304 undergraduates who were presented videotaped speeches by a bogus CEO of a software company. A 2 × 2 × 2 design was employed in which message content (visionary/non-visionary), delivery (strong/weak), and organizational performance (high/low) were manipulated. A modified, 7-item version of Meindl and Ehrlich's (1988) Romance of Leadership Scale (RLS-D) served as a covariate. A MANCOVA analysis indicated significant effects of delivery, content, and organizational performance on both perceived leader charisma and effectiveness. The RLS-D was unrelated to either dependent variable as a covariate. The results suggest that strength of delivery is an especially important determinant of perceptions' of leader charisma and effectiveness. Although speech content and organizational performance cues likewise accounted for variance in these perceptions, their effects were at times offset by those of delivery.

Perceptions of leader charisma and effectiveness: The effects of vision content, delivery, and organizational performance

A focus on needs and the ability to generate knowledge about needs is highly valuable for organizations because it extends the range of possible solutions and therefore enables them to create more innovative and sustainable products and services. Our paper will explore how a framework based on an abductive reasoning process for the creation and discovery of knowledge about needs in organizations can look like and what the main steps of such a framework are, in order to integrate this approach into the model of the knowledge-based firm. Moreover we will present empirical findings from a project with Austrian companies where this framework has been used.

Creation of Need Knowledge in Organizations: An Abductive Framework

Following recent calls to extend our understanding of organizational unlearning, we gain empirical insights into how the process unfolds in practice. Based on the findings of a study with change co...

Two forms of organizational unlearning: Insights from engaged scholarship research with change consultants:

!!!! Creating Knowledge of Need: A Methodological Framework for its Abductive Inference 

!! Introduction

The fulfilment of humans needs is a physiological prerequisite for the individual's survival and prosperity [1]. Hence, the knowledge about needs is valuable assuming that knowing one’s need, rather than a certain satisfier to that need, enables us to find new/different ways of need satisfaction. Surprisingly, first empirical data suggest that people hardly talk about their needs and desires but rather about certain satisfiers meaning concrete objects or conditions when asked about what they need for their personal well-being. Furthermore, some philosophers claim that we cannot be aware of our needs directly but only of their satisfiers. [2]

!! Research Question and Methods

The question at hand is how researchers can look “behind” an observable satisfier (e.g. objects, state of affairs etc.) and identify the underlying need. So, the main concern is to make explicit what might be implicitly defining our acting. The aim of this empirical master thesis which is based on a project with the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber with about 150 untrained participants is to propose a replicable and consistent methodological framework for creating need knowledge which can be understood as explicit knowledge about one’s needs and desires. The project aims at finding a method for non-instantaneous settings meaning that data acquisition and analysis are sequential rather than iterative (no possibility for researchers to check back directly what the underlying need is).

I am going to employ qualitative research methods in general and an abductive approach [3] in particular. Finding hypothetical explanations (needs) for the satisfiers observed (questionees report about their imagined future of a fulfilled professional life) should be supported by heterogeneous paradigmatic views on the data. Those views are based on different theories and approaches (e.g. theory of causality, generative listening [2]) and should be crystallized into sets of questions promoting the abductive process. Finally, to transform the bunch of hypothesis generated by researchers into verified knowledge about needs, a concluding feedback loop integrating the questionees in the knowledge creation process once again (communicative validation [3]) will be implemented.

!! Structure

After dealing with the theoretical backgrounds including the concept of need (and its relation to satisfier and desire), the epistemological foundations of need knowledge, theories on abductive reasoning, hermeneutics and communicative validation, I will evaluate approaches being potentially valuable for the abductive reasoning process and finally tailoring them to be usable for the research project (views on data). Additionally, I will discuss the role of researchers in and their effects on the knowledge creating process.

!! References

[1] G. Thomson, “Fundamental Needs,” in The Philosophy of Need, S. Reader, Ed. Cambridge: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2005.
[2] S. K. McLeod, “Knowledge of Need,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 211–230, Jun. 2011.
[3] H. Asvoll, "Abduction, deduction and induction: can these concepts be used for an understanding of methodological processes in interpretative case studies?," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, (ahead-of-print), pp. 1-19, 2013.

Creating Knowledge of Need: A Methodological Framework for its Abductive Inference

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens’ needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens’ needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it.

Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Innovation processes require organizations to transcend current boundaries. These include not only technological as well as social limitations but -above all- the way we address the future. We are used to face the future with our existing knowledge and experiences from the past. This strategy, however, can hardly lead to knowledge off the beaten path. We therefore suggest a new learning approach for organizations which enables to literally envision a desired future scenario and thus, allows for the creation of radical new knowledge.

In this paper we focus on organizational learning towards the future and compare its output with traditional learning from the past. Based on the idea of Learning from the Future (Greenleaf, 1977; Jaworski, 1998; C. O. Scharmer & Kaeufer, 2013; Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers., 2005) we extend the organizational learning process with an additional source of learning. By interacting with an ideal envisioned future, individuals are enabled to detach particularly from their doubts, concerns and restrictions grounded in their past experiences, which in turn clarifies the necessary actions to realize this desired scenario. We have been successfully applying Learning from Interacting with an Envisioned Future, in short Learning from an Envisioned Future, to various problem settings and different project sizes. (Kaiser, Fordinal, & Kragulj, 2014)
We argue that our method leads to new knowledge which generally yields a higher degree of novelty and radicalness. In order to support our assumption we present our findings from comparing the output of Learning from an Envisioned Future and learning from the past. For this study we use data from an on ongoing organizational learning project we are currently conducting with a high school in Austria. (Kaiser & Kragulj, 2015)

To investigate whether the approaches lead to considerably different results in terms of quality and quantity we apply the Paradigm Relatedness Framework by Nagasundaram & Bostrom (1994). By using this method, we assess the novelty and degrees of "radical change" for the system induced by the individual ideas and compare the overall output in a systematic way. The research question of our paper is the following: How does the use of Learning from Interacting with an Envisioned Future as an additional learning mode support the quality and quantity of innovative ideas?

Does the output of both learning modes differ in terms of quality and quantity so that they could be used together in order to provide a more holistic knowledge creation?

Initial findings suggest that Learning from an Envisioned Future does produce significantly more output modifying the dominant paradigms in the school system compared to the output we gained from the conventional learning approach. Thus, we reason that Learning from an Envisioned Future yields more potential to knowledge that can be regarded as radically new.

Our paper will be structured in the following way. Firstly, we will discuss the theoretical background of our advanced approach of Learning from an Envisioned Future. Secondly, we will describe the ongoing research project with an Austrian high school as a qualitative case study. Subsequently, we will extensively compare the results of the two learning approaches we facilitated in the case study in terms of their quantity and quality measured by the Paradigm Relatedness Framework.

Florian Kragulj

Papers

Creation of Need Knowledge in Organizations: An Abductive Framework

Two forms of organizational unlearning: Insights from engaged scholarship research with change consultants:

Creating Knowledge of Need: A Methodological Framework for its Abductive Inference

Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Extending the Organizational Learning Process in Order to Enable Innovative Ideas