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 Do Things With Words

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

The integration of geographic information depends on many factors, such as the way information is organized and the level of detail of each of its pieces. To face the problem of organization we proposed the use of ontologies as the basic representation of geographic information. We chose a hierarchical organization, because hierarchies are a good way of representing the geographic world. Since geographic phenomena change over time and can also be seen as different things by different groups of people, we introduced the concept of roles. A geographic object can play different roles at the same time or during its lifetime depending on the point of view of a group of users. Roles act as the bridge between different levels of detail in an ontology structure. They are used also for networking ontologies of different domains. To validate our use of the concept of roles and hierarchies as the support for the ontology representation structure we made a simulation in which we measured the potential for information integration when combining two ontologies. Four different evaluation measures were used to assess the potential for information integration: (1) using roles, (2) using roles and hierarchies, (3) using only hierarchies, and (4) using neither roles nor hierarchies.

http://www.geoinfo.info/portuguese/geoinfo2001/papers/120fred.pdf

Role-Based Geographic Information Integration

This paper describes a proof-of-concept designed to test a meta-model ontology based on scenarios for representing the procedural knowledge of a given domain. The research was conducted as part of a study on methodologies to build ontologies for Information Systems. The frequent use of scenarios in the initial steps of the methodologies motivated us to investigate its use in the process of building ontologies for IS modeling. This research proposes the use of the components of scenarios as constructs of a meta-model ontology. With this approach, the process of building scenarios about a domain is mingled with the process of building domain ontologies.

A Meta-Model Ontology based on Scenarios

The conclusions drawn from network science regarding the asymmetric structuring of real-world networks offer important theoretical orientation in addressing the shifting pedagogical topography of distributed learning networks. Problematizing the development of learning theory and pedagogy surrounding networked learning in this regard, this analysis develops an empirical case study of the actors and processes contributing to the structuring of a distributed learning network. Despite finding a highly-connected core of facilitators and participants, course facilitators maintain the greatest influence within the learning network. Further analyses detail the relationships between this core group of actors and asymmetries of media production, interactivity, and network expansion. These findings inform theoretically-directed discussion of networked pedagogy.

Frederico T. Fonseca

Papers

Role-Based Geographic Information Integration

A Meta-Model Ontology based on Scenarios

Networked pedagogy: exploring asymmetries in the structuring of distributed learning networks