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

Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.

/pdf/understanding-customer-experience-throughout-the-customer-52i6qreyzk.pdf

Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey

https://www.rug.nl/staff/p.c.verhoef/jr_customer_experience.pdf

Customer Experience Creation: Determinants, Dynamics and Management Strategies

Online customer experience in e-retailing: an empirical model of antecedents and outcomes

This study proposes a conceptual model for customer experience quality and its impact on customer relationship outcomes. Customer experience is conceptualized as the customer’s subjective response to the holistic direct and indirect encounter with the firm, and customer experience quality as its perceived excellence or superiority. Using the repertory grid technique in 40 interviews in B2B and B2C contexts, the authors find that customer experience quality is judged with respect to its contribution to value-in-use, and hence propose that value-in-use mediates between experience quality and relationship outcomes. Experience quality includes evaluations not just of the firm’s products and services but also of peer-to-peer and complementary supplier encounters. In assessing experience quality in B2B contexts, customers place a greater emphasis on firm practices that focus on understanding and delivering value-in-use than is generally the case in B2C contexts. Implications for practitioners’ customer insight processes and future research directions are suggested.

/pdf/customer-experience-quality-an-exploration-in-business-and-2qqmuw49xt.pdf

Customer experience quality: an exploration in business and consumer contexts using repertory grid technique

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/20885.pdf

How to Sustain the Customer Experience:: An Overview of Experience Components that Co-create Value With the Customer

Actor-network theory and stakeholder collaboration: the case of Cultural Districts.

This study presents a micro-level investigation that provides new insights into how employees' knowledge sharing affects their own innovative work behaviours (IWBs). Our study posited three mechanisms linking an individual's knowledge sharing behaviours to his or her own IWBs: (i) a direct effect whereby the act of sharing elicits a recombination and translation of knowledge that facilitates innovation; (ii) an indirect effect whereby knowledge sharing creates social conditions (i.e., reciprocation with new knowledge) for innovation; (iii) a distal effect whereby the antecedents of knowledge sharing also promote innovation. We tested these hypotheses on 155 employees in four palliative care organizations. Our results provide original evidence that employees who share knowledge also engage more in creating, promoting and implementing innovations. This study reveals a direct, unmediated link between knowledge sharing behaviours and IWBs. Our evidence suggests that it is the act of knowledge recombination and translation embedded in knowledge sharing that exerts the most positive effect on IWBs. We discuss how this result indicates that sharing knowledge ignites transformation and exploitation capabilities that help sharers innovate their own work practices.

Knowledge Sharing and Innovative Work Behaviour in Healthcare: A Micro-Level Investigation of Direct and Indirect Effects

Purpose – This study aims to offer new insights to further the understanding on the relevance of engaging employees in knowledge sharing behaviours in order to improve current operations.Design/methodology/approach – The authors' conceptual model proposes a direct relationship between knowledge sharing behaviours and employees' innovative behaviour, moderated by employees' perception of social capital. Six hypotheses were developed from the literature, grounded and tested among 198 employees of four hospices and palliative care organisations (H&PCOs) for dying cancer patients. All constructs were measured using multiple‐item scales that were adapted from previous related studies. The authors' hypotheses were tested using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR).Findings – This study has three main results. First, the authors found a positive role of knowledge sharing behaviours in affecting sharers' innovativeness, in terms of propensity and capacity to promote and implement new ideas. Second, sharing best pr...

Promoting professionals' innovative behaviour through knowledge sharing: the moderating role of social capital

Healthcare organisations are facing the constant trade off to contain expenditures without sacrificing the quality of patient's care. This challenge to do ‘more with less’ induced healthcare executives to heavily invest in innovations activities in order to increase the efficiency of their organisations. By taking an individual-level perspective, our study focuses on knowledge-sharing behaviour among healthcare practitioners as a critical element to continuously improve the performance of healthcare organisations. Specifically we explore the effect of intellectual capital on practitioners’ knowledge-sharing behaviour, and propose organisational knowledge-sharing climate as mediator. We conducted a survey on three healthcare organisations. Our results substantiate the positive link between intellectual capital and knowledge-sharing behaviour, and reveal that organisational knowledge-sharing climate fully mediates this relationship. These findings provide hospital managers with key implications for the management of intellectual capital as a lever to improve the sharing and the diffusion of knowledge among practitioners.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fkmrp.2011.29.pdf

Nicola Spiller

Papers

How to Sustain the Customer Experience:: An Overview of Experience Components that Co-create Value With the Customer

Actor-network theory and stakeholder collaboration: the case of Cultural Districts.

Knowledge Sharing and Innovative Work Behaviour in Healthcare: A Micro-Level Investigation of Direct and Indirect Effects

Promoting professionals' innovative behaviour through knowledge sharing: the moderating role of social capital

Intellectual capital and knowledge sharing: the mediating role of organisational knowledge-sharing climate