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

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology

(1963). Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Technometrics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 128-130.

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup. Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all.

Prologue to The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

The dominant view in managerial practice assumes that competencies are “universal” constructs whose meaning is independent from any specific context. The “universalist” approach ensures a high degree of efficiency through standardization of competency codebooks. However, the effectiveness of this approach has often been questioned. Overgeneralization makes the description of competencies ambiguous and does not provide HR managers with adequate practical information. An alternative, “situationalist” approach defines competencies as situated, idiosyncratic constructs whose meaning is deeply influenced by organizational culture and by the unique way people make sense of their jobs. We propose a methodological approach to competency management based on a situationalist perspective. Through a field study carried out in a large Italian organization, we discuss the issues relevant to consider when developing competency-management systems though a situationalist approach. In particular, we show that the situationalist approach, by ensuring higher attention to the meaning and to the situated nature of competencies, is more capable of dealing with some of the critical management challenges outlined in the recent literature, such as the demand for more participative approaches and the increasing emphasis on emerging competencies. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A situationalist perspective to competency management

The main results of a research project spanning over several years are presented in this paper. The aim of the research was the improvement of the effectiveness of personnel assessment within a large Italian corporation operating in the research sector. The first step of the research consisted of the analysis of the raters’ behavior, so as to elicit the judgement categories and prototypes they used in the judgement formulation, based on the rating method adopted in the corporation. The second step consisted of improving the rating method using fuzzy logic. The corporate management tested the new rating method and found it more efficient and reliable than the previous one.

Applying fuzzy logic to personnel assessment : a case study

This paper presents a methodological approach for the evaluation of innovation capabilities in small software firms. The methodology is based on the assumption of a relationship between specific resources managed by small software firms and their innovation capabilities. Within the proposed methodological approach, a model for the quantitative analysis of innovation capabilities is presented. In order to show how the methodology can be applied to concrete situations, three case studies of small firms operating in the software sector and information services are presented and discussed.

Giuseppe Zollo

Papers

A situationalist perspective to competency management

Applying fuzzy logic to personnel assessment : a case study

The Evaluation of Innovation Capabilities in Small Software Firms: A Methodological Approach*

Organizational Cognition and Learning: Building Systems for the Learning Organization

Mediating debate through on-line large-scale argumentation: Evidence from the field