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

Although the literature on university–industry links has begun to uncover the reasons for, and types of, collaboration between universities and businesses, it offers relatively little explanation of ways to reduce the barriers in these collaborations. This paper seeks to unpack the nature of the obstacles to collaborations between universities and industry, exploring influence of different mechanisms in lowering barriers related to the orientation of universities and to the transactions involved in working with university partners. Drawing on a large-scale survey and public records, this paper explores the effects of collaboration experience, breadth of interaction, and inter-organizational trust on lowering different types of barriers. The analysis shows that prior experience of collaborative research lowers orientation-related barriers and that greater levels of trust reduce both types of barriers studied. It also indicates that breadth of interaction diminishes the orientation-related, but increases transaction-related barriers. The paper explores the implications of these findings for policies aimed at facilitating university–industry collaboration.

Investigating the factors that diminish the barriers to university-industry collaboration

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

A solution to get the problem off, have you found it? Really? What kind of solution do you resolve the problem? From what sources? Well, there are so many questions that we utter every day. No matter how you will get the solution, it will mean better. You can take the reference from some books. And the the idea of a university is one book that we really recommend you to read, to get more solutions in solving this problem.

The idea of a university

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Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1977 and 1976. Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, Series P-20, No. 314.

Existing urban transport systems have fundamentally shaped our modern urban economies and societies, however, disruptive technologies, as fundamental as recent ICT disruptions, threaten major chang...

How to ride transport disruption –a sustainable framework for future urban mobility*

‘Linking the Knowledge Economy, Urban Intensity and Transport in Post-Industrial Cities with a Case Study of Perth’ As economies are transformed by growth in the knowledge-intensive economy, this thesis examines how urban intensification is impacting on post-industrial cities. While a global perspective is considered, a case study of Perth, Western Australia, is used. This thesis proposes that cities in post-industrial economies are characterised and driven by a multilayered intensification of knowledge. This includes: • intensification or agglomeration of knowledge economic activity; • intensification of human capital knowledge; and • intensification of the means of knowledge exchange i.e. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems and transport. The research concludes that post-industrial cities such as Perth are, in respect of the growing knowledge-intensive economy, returning to a monocentric urban structure. This is because of a market demand for urban centres that both facilitate economic agglomeration by increasing tacit knowledge exchange through face-to-face interaction and provide scale and knowledge intensity in the urban labour and service markets. The polycentric premise of accepted metropolitan planning is therefore questioned. An alternative urban structure is proposed for metropolitan scale cities, which includes a more targeted and focused polycentric approach. This is based on the intensification and densification of key urban centres around universities as the complementary centres for the central CBD. The intensification in cities is also shown to be occurring with urban transport. Consistent with the worldwide trend away from spatially inefficient private motor vehicle use, Perth is seeing an increase in spatially intense forms of transport with knowledge-intensive professional workers. It is concluded that walking in dense urban centres is the fundamental means of creating face-to-face interaction. In a knowledge-intensive economy, reliant on scale in labour and service markets, capacity for dense centres is provided by high capacity spatially efficient transport, of which rail is the most spatially efficient. This thesis is significant in that it suggests the need to rethink both the underlying premises for metropolitan spatial and transport planning in post-industrial cities.

Linking the knowledge economy, urban intensity and transport in post-industrial cities with a case study of Perth, Western Australia

Exploring public charging infrastructure requirements for short-haul electric trucks

This paper reviews the spatial and agglomeration characteristics of the internet and the knowledge economy and their potential impact on urban planning and public transport. This paper then considers Perth, Western Australia, as a case study looking at its spatial urban planning and public transport characteristics, which in many ways do not support the future development of a networked knowledge economy. The paper concludes by proposing a radial-orbital rail system for Perth, Western Australia (see Figure 1). The ‘Knowledge Ring’ rail line is proposed as part of a wider radial-orbital rail network and is named as such, as it would: connect the Perth Central Business District (CBD) with several key tertiary and research institutions as part of a wider networked radial-orbital public transport system; deliver an urban network of activity centres with a focus on knowledge and digital economic production better suited to the economic and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

Devising public transport systems for twenty-first century economically productive cities – the proposed Knowledge Ring for Perth

Wind has been utilized for passive ventilation and mechanical power since antiquity. As an abundant renewable resource, today, wind is increasingly seen as a critical resource to help tackle issues associated with rapid urbanization and climate adaptation and mitigation, such as improving thermal comfort, providing clean energy, improving air quality, and reducing carbon emissions. Despite the growing importance of wind as an invaluable resource for cities, wind in the context of urban planning and design is a relatively understudied area of research. This study aims to explore the means by which cities that can benefit from wind and ways urban planning and design can help deliver these benefits. The study adopts a systematic literature review methodological approach. The findings disclosed that: (a) improving urban wind environment via sound urban planning and design may enhance urban ventilation and energy performance; (b) better urban ventilation and energy performance enable cities to become climate positive or net zero and relieve the urgent climate crisis; (c) wind sensitive urban design is an emerging research area critical to harvest the benefits of wind for cities. This study offers a novel conceptual framework and research directions for wind sensitive urban design and informs urban planning, design policy and practices.

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Michael Kane

Papers

How to ride transport disruption –a sustainable framework for future urban mobility*

Linking the knowledge economy, urban intensity and transport in post-industrial cities with a case study of Perth, Western Australia

Exploring public charging infrastructure requirements for short-haul electric trucks

Devising public transport systems for twenty-first century economically productive cities – the proposed Knowledge Ring for Perth

Leveraging the Opportunities of Wind for Cities through Urban Planning and Design: A PRISMA Review