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

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

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The Third Wave

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Clay Shirky. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. 242 pages, $25.95 pbk. It sometimes seems that the hardest thing to do in the Information Age is to communicate. In the rush of easily accessible data and the maelstrom of conflicting viewpoints, two otherwise intelligent people can talk past one another as they stake out territory with the tenacity of computer viruses. NYU professor Clay Shirky and media critic Nicholas Carr have been squaring off now for two years over what impact the Internet is having on our society. Shirky takes the more optimistic viewpoint, Carr the more pessimistic. Carr threw down the gauntlet with his 2008 Atlantic cover article "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" and has continued the debate with his recent book The Shallows. Shirky provides a response in Cognitive Surplus, but criticizes skeptics like Carr only obliquely. Shirky says their main frustration is with the profusion of choice: "Scarcity," he says, "is easier to deal with than abundance." But this book doesn't dwell much on the naysayers. Instead, it frames the subject of the Internet with a bold and startling vision about its potential. "Imagine," he says, "treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus." We've not always used that surplus wisely. Shirky's case in point is television, and how it has come to dominate our culture. Over much of the planet, Shirky writes, "the three most common activities are . . . work, sleep, and watching TV." Like gin in early-eighteenth-century London, twentieth-century television is one of those social habits that critics have denounced and tried hard to minimize, but without success. There are signs now, however, that TV viewing - still thoroughly popular - isn't quite the juggernaut it used to be. Young people are increasingly turning to the Internet; and the Web, it turns out, allows humans to do things they can't do with other media - namely, create, produce, and connect. Instead of devoting twenty passive hours a week to the tube (the international average), people now use a medium that lets them make and share things. That may seem trivial, considering the amount of silly, offensive, or deceptive fare on the Web, but think of it this way: Which do you think contains more enduring cultural, intellectual, and societal value - posting comments on a blog or watching Gitligan's Island! The Internet is no utopia, but neither are older media. In fact, some of them may be a good deal less salutary. Take, for example, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. As Shirky puts it in a tart retort: "However pathetic you may think it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it's worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." There's a wide variety of content on the Internet, of course - the widest in any medium - and the largest number of producers of content: a colossal and revolutionary force. The "hundred million hours of cumulative thought" it took to produce Wikipedia is one example of Shirky's "cognitive surplus," and while it still pales before the "two hundred billion hours of TV every year," you can readily see the potential. …

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

According to the main theories of the knowledge-based economy (KBE), the recent transformations of capitalism are the origins of a general societal change. Managerial theories consider KBE to be a ...

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Loris Caruso

Papers

The ‘knowledge-based economy’ and the relationship between the economy and society in contemporary capitalism