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

1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

This paper introduces a social network perspective to the study of strategic alliances. It extends prior research, which has primarily considered alliances as dyadic exchanges and paid less attention to the fact that key precursors, processes, and outcomes associated with alliances can be defined and shaped in important ways by the social networks within which most firms are embedded. It identifies five key issues for the study of alliances: (1) the formation of alliances, (2) the choice of governance structure, (3) the dynamic evolution of alliances, (4) the performance of alliances, and (5) the performance consequences for firms entering alliances. For each of these issues, this paper outlines some of the current research and debates at the firm and dyad level and then discusses some of the new and important insights that result from introducing a network perspective. It highlights current network research on alliances and suggests an agenda for future research. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Alliances and networks

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

This article examines the governance of organizational networks and the impact of governance on network effectiveness. Three basic models, or forms, of network governance are developed focusing on their distinct structural properties. Propositions are formulated examining conditions for the effectiveness of each form. The tensions inherent in each form are then discussed, followed by the role that management may play in addressing these tensions. Finally, the evolution of governance is explored.

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Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness

This paper is an effort to review and organize the now vast literature on inter firm networks, with the aim of assessing the important current forms of net work, the organizational mechanisms supporting them, and the main variables that have been shown to influence network emergence and shape. These results are achieved through a literature review encompassing a number of approaches across the social sciences. The paper can therefore be used as a typological state-of-art on inter-firm networks, and as a basis for developing hypotheses of relationship between network antecedents and forms.

Inter-firm Networks: Antecedents, Mechanisms and Forms

An extensive body of knowledge exists on network outcomes and on how network structures may contribute to the creation of outcomes at different levels of analysis, but less attention has been paid to understanding how and why organizational networks emerge, evolve, and change. Improved understanding of network dynamics is important for several reasons, perhaps the most critical being that the understanding of network outcomes is only partial without an appreciation of the genesis of the network structures that resulted in such outcomes. To provide a context for the papers in this special issue, and with the broader goal of furthering network dynamics research, we present a framework that begins by discussing the meaning and role of network dynamics and goes on to identify the drivers and key dimensions of network change as well as the role of time in this process. We conclude with theoretical and methodological issues that researchers need to address in this domain.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Genesis and Dynamics of Organizational Networks

We develop and test a theory of the origins of network structures, specifically of structural holes, building and testing a theoretical framework proposing that network structures emerge from the interplay of two complementary forces: structural constraints and network opportunities. We analyze data on a co-membership network among 501 production teams in the Italian TV production industry tracked over a period of 12 years, explicitly accounting for endogeneity. We find that structural holes spanned by teams originate from the prior status and centrality of teams that members were part of in the past, in addition to structural holes spanned in the past. But a focal team spans fewer structural holes if its members were part of cohesive teams earlier and if the past teams they were connected to produced similar artistic content. We also demonstrate that spanning structural holes is associated with superior team performance in terms of greater viewership. The results support both opportunity exploitation and...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/27749304

Network Evolution: The Origins of Structural Holes.

Investigating the efficacy of two alternative network structures, closure and structural holes, from the contingent perspective of time, we connect past and current social structures to outcomes. We show that, in the Italian television production industry, current structural holes rather than past ones, but past closure rather than current closure, help current network performance. Thus, structural holes and closure are both valuable, but at different points in time.

Network Memory: The Influence of Past and Current Networks on Performance

We take a network perspective to organizational architecture, conceptualizing it as multiple networks of both formal and informal interactions and argue that their interplay is key to better understanding individual organizational member performance. We develop and test the concept of network consistency as the overlap between the informal network of advice and information with formal structures and processes, expressed as networks. We theorize that consistency between formal and informal networks exerts differing effects on performance. We test our theory in a financial services firm, using secondary data to create formal networks and annual performance evaluations for our dependent variable, along with primary survey data from organizational members to obtain the informal advice and information network. Results support our network approach to organizational architecture. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Giuseppe Soda

Papers

Inter-firm Networks: Antecedents, Mechanisms and Forms

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Genesis and Dynamics of Organizational Networks

Network Evolution: The Origins of Structural Holes.

Network Memory: The Influence of Past and Current Networks on Performance

A network perspective on organizational architecture: performance effects of the interplay of formal and informal organization