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

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

A meta-analysis of the technology acceptance model

Internet-delivered e-services are increasingly being made available to consumers; however, little is known about how consumers evaluate them for potential adoption. Past Technology Adoption Research has focused primarily on the positive utility gains attributable to system adoption. This research extends that approach to include measures of negative utility (potential losses) attributable to e-service adoption. Drawing from Perceived Risk Theory, specific risk facets were operationalized, integrated, and empirically tested within the Technology Acceptance Model resulting in a proposed e-services adoption model. Results indicated that e-services adoption is adversely affected primarily by performance-based risk perceptions, and perceived ease of use of the e-service reduced these risk concerns. Implications of integrating perceived risk into the proposed e-services adoption model are discussed.

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Predicting e-services adoption: a perceived risk facets perspective

Evaluating Model Fit

An assessment of value creation in mobile service delivery and the moderating role of time consciousness

So far, the term e‐commerce has been primarily associated with communicating the brand and/or enabling sales transactions. However, the next vista for companies operating in the virtual marketplace seems to be e‐service or, delivering value‐added, interactive services to customers. This e‐business function has been left virtually unexplored in the services research literature. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate the impact of organizational reputation, relative advantage, and perceived risk on perceived service quality, trust and behavioral intentions of customers towards adopting e‐services. In the context of an electronic travel service, hypotheses on the relationships between aforementioned variables are investigated by means of an experimental study. The results suggest that the three factors have a significant main effect on the customers’ attitude and behavior towards e‐service. The only exception is that relative advantage does not appear to have a significant impact on customer trust. The results also show that organizational reputation and perceived risk have a combined effect: a good organizational reputation impacts the effect of perceived risk on the three dependent variables. Finally, the three factors appeared to be evenly important in the forming of customers’ attitude and behavior. Again, the only exception is that organizational reputation and perceived risk appear to be more important in terms of trust than relative advantage.

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Customer adoption of e‐service: an experimental study

An Exploration of Consumer Resistance to Innovation and Its Antecedents

M-commerce has been heralded repeatedly as the new service frontier of the millennium Present market reality, however, seems to be less optimistic Therefore, the current study explores the factors contributing to the adoption of mobile services in a context of wireless finance The technology acceptance model was used as a point of departure For this study, perceived cost, system quality and social influence were added to the model, and the latter two displayed significant effects in the empirical research Moderating effects of the variables age, computer skills, mobile technology readiness and social influence were investigated, all of which proved to be relevant in the context presented

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M.H.P. Kleijnen

Papers

An assessment of value creation in mobile service delivery and the moderating role of time consciousness

Customer adoption of e‐service: an experimental study

An Exploration of Consumer Resistance to Innovation and Its Antecedents

Consumer Acceptance of Wireless Finance

Mobile Shopper Marketing: Key Issues, Current Insights, and Future Research Avenues