According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

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

Social Network Analysis

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

How we Think

The paper attempts a synthesis of problems relating to municipal waste management in Nigeria and proposes a conceptual knowledge management approach for tackling municipal waste problems in cities across Nigeria. The application of knowledge management approach and strategy is crucial for inculcating a change of attitude towards improving the management of waste. The paper is a review of existing literatures, information, policies and data on municipal waste management in Nigeria. The inefficient management of waste by individuals, households, consumers and waste management companies can be attributed to inadequate information on waste management benefits, lack of producers' involvement in waste management as well as poor implementation of government policies. The paper presents an alternative approach providing solutions promoting efficient municipal waste management. Keywords—Environment, Knowledge management, Municipal

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Municipal Solid Waste Management Problems in Nigeria: Evolving Knowledge Management Solution

Patent users such as governments, inventors, and manufacturing organizations strive to identify the directions in which new technology is advancing, and their goal is to outline the boundaries of existing knowledge. The paper analyzes patent knowledge to identify research trends. A model based on knowledge extraction from patents and self-organizing maps for knowledge representation is presented. The model was tested on patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The experiments show that the method provides both an overview of the directions of the trends and a drill-down perspective of current trends.

Identification of trends from patents using self-organizing maps

Circular economy as a business driver is growing in bio economy, industry and service business. That means great opportunity for all kind of businesses but at the same time a huge business transition. The opportunities of sustainability and circular economy have not been understood in full context and as new service innovation. Responsibility business management is an integrator on the path. The paradigm shift in the effective circular economy is the alteration of purchase behavior from ownership and selling of machines to offering of services. Obvious development activity is to increase the efficiency in supply network. Digitalization is rapidly increasing and enterprises must find new ways to innovate for business advantage. Through digital transformation, the use of new technologies like cloud, mobile, big data, and social networks with increasing intelligence and automation enterprises can capitalize on new business and optimization opportunities. Responsibility business leadership needs democratic innovation culture and co-innovation and co-evolution processes. This article introduces a concept tool for responsible business leadership. It helps to analyze co-evolution over the life cycle of business transition on circular economy by using Evolute, the intelligent web-based system, for managing human opinions and experiences as well as public- private-relationships and responsible business leadership capabilities.

Digitalization and Big Data Supporting Responsible Business Co-evolution

This paper reviews the concept of Industry 4.0 related challenges and basic requirements for successful implementation of it. It proposed that sociotechnical system theory (STS) and competence-based view (CBV) are best approaches towards implementation of industry 4.0 in the organizations. STS theory leads to such systems, which are more acceptable to end users and deliver better value. While competence-based view prepares those users to interact efficiently with new systems. To support competence-based view for industry 4.0 we argue that competence models of the Evolute approach need to be revised and updated, as well as, there is need for new competence models for emerging new job profiles. The combination of these three approaches will result into successful implementation of new industry 4.0 systems in the organizations.

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Review of Industry 4.0 in the Light of Sociotechnical System Theory and Competence-Based View: A Future Research Agenda for the Evolute Approach

Recently questioning and answering (QA the key factors of mobile Q&A usage are accessibility/convenience of mobile Q&A, promptness of receiving answers, and users' satisficing behavior of information seeking (i.e., minimizing efforts and settling with good enough information). We also observe that users tend to seek more factual information attributed to everyday life activities than they do on traditional Q&A sites and that they exhibit unique interaction patterns such as repeating and refining questions as coping strategies in seeking information needs. Our main findings reported in the paper have significant implications on the design of mobile Q&A systems.

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Jussi Kantola

Papers

Municipal Solid Waste Management Problems in Nigeria: Evolving Knowledge Management Solution

Identification of trends from patents using self-organizing maps

Digitalization and Big Data Supporting Responsible Business Co-evolution

Review of Industry 4.0 in the Light of Sociotechnical System Theory and Competence-Based View: A Future Research Agenda for the Evolute Approach

Understanding mobile Q&A usage: an exploratory study