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

This 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior. Its current appearance as a paperback is a testimonial both to the quality of the work and to the prominence of deviant behavior in this generation. In general the author places deviance in perspective, identifies types of deviant behavior, considers the role of rule makers and enforcers, and some of the problems in studying deviance. In addition, he develops a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations. In his study of a particular kind of deviance, the use of marihuana, the author posits and tests systematically an hypothesis about the genesis of marihuana use for pleasure. The hypothesis traces the sequence of changes in individual attitude

Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

On Educational psychology: A cognitive view.

This is the first handbook where the world’s foremost “experts on expertise” review our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts’ knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge of the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise, such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

textVeel marketing problemen zijn zwak-gestructureerd. Vanuit de psychologie weten we dat analoog redeneren een effectieve manier is om dit soort problemen op te lossen. Dat wil zeggen: een van de eerste dingen die een manager zal doen wanneer hij geconfronteerd wordt met een dergelijk probleem is in zijn geheugen zoeken naar eerdere, soortgelijke ervaringen (of cases) die zouden kunnen helpen bij het oplossen van het probleem. “Case-Based” Redeneren (CBR) is een geavanceerde techniek, afkomstig uit het vakgebied van de kunstmatige intelligentie, die deze vorm van menselijk redeneren nabootst en gebruikt kan worden om de grote hoeveelheid, op ervaring gebaseerde marketing kennis aan te wenden voor het nemen van beslissingen. In een aantal experimenten onderzoeken wij de effectiviteit en efficientie van het beschikbaar maken van een CBR-systeem onder verschillende condities. Hiervoor gebruiken we het ontwerpen van “sales promotie” campagnes als zwak-gestructureerd toepassingsdomein binnen de marketing.
Deze dissertatie laat zien dat analoog redeneren helpt om marketing beslissingen te verbeteren. Om precies te zijn: we tonen aan dat een CBR-systeem helpt om betere, creatievere “sales promotie” campagnes te ontwerpen en om ze efficienter te ontwerpen. Bovendien laten we zien dat de effecten van de beschikbaarheid van een CBR-systeem afhankelijk zijn van: (1) de inhoud van de “case-base” (d.w.z., nabije analogieen versus verre analogieen), (2) de grootte van de “case-base” (d.w.z., een groot aantal cases versus een standaard aantal cases), en (3) de karakteristieken van de beslisser (d.w.z., creativiteit). Interessant is dat we vinden dat het effect van de beschikbaarheid van een CBR-systeem op de kwaliteit van de oplossing het grootst is voor beslissers die minder creatief van zichzelf zijn. Verder laten we zien dat beslissers problemen hebben met het inschatten van de bijdrage van het CBR-systeem aan de objectieve kwaliteit van hun oplossing. Tot slot formuleren we een aantal aanbevelingen voor managers die gebaseerd zijn op deze bevindingen, zoals “leg marketing kennis vast en maak het beschikbaar in de vorm van cases” en “verschillende typen beslissers hebben verschillende typen CBR-systemen nodig”.

Analogical Reasoning as a Decision Support Principle for Weakly-Structured Marketing Problems

Brand activism: Does courting controversy help or hurt a brand?

Atypical practices of crossing categories or genres are generally discouraged in the market, but the ideal of the Renaissance mind1 persists. Building on recent work elaborating the need to reward ...

“Notable” or “Not Able” When Are Acts of Inconsistency Rewarded?

Two brief, 15-minute measures of creative ability have become available quite recently. The Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) objectively measures creative ability in terms of the creativity of answers over 3 tasks. The Abedi Test of Creativity (ATC) subjectively measures creative ability by means of a self-rating questionnaire. Our first study examined the predictive validity of both methods by correlating prospective marketing employees' ATTA and ATC scores with the expert-judged creativity of a marketing campaign that they were asked to design. The objective ATTA test scores correlated substantially with creative performance, unlike the subjective ATC self-rating method that was much less predictively valid. A second study with current employees of a marketing agency demonstrated discriminant validity for the ATTA by revealing that ATTA scores and supervisor ratings of creative ability correlated highly for longer-term employees, but poorly for new recruits. Based on the results of these 2 st...

The Validity of Two Brief Measures of Creative Ability

We investigate the effectiveness of three types of IT-enabled cognitive stimulation tools for enhancing creative problem solving: mind mappers, process guides, and stimuli providers. Based on the dual pathway to creativity models, the authors examine the extent to which these tools are capable of stimulating individuals to explore their knowledge base more deeply (i.e., the persistence pathway) and more broadly (i.e., the flexibility pathway) and, hence, help to produce more novel ideas. In a laboratory study with business students, they find that, as compared to unaided individuals, IT-enabled stimuli providers enhance individual creativity more than process guides and mind mappers. As for the underlying creative process, stimuli providers push individuals to explore their knowledge base more deeply and more broadly, leading to more novel but, unexpectedly, also more useful ideas. The reported findings may facilitate the development of creativity support systems and their assignment to individual...

Niek Althuizen

Papers

Analogical Reasoning as a Decision Support Principle for Weakly-Structured Marketing Problems

Brand activism: Does courting controversy help or hurt a brand?

“Notable” or “Not Able” When Are Acts of Inconsistency Rewarded?

The Validity of Two Brief Measures of Creative Ability

The Effects of IT-Enabled Cognitive Stimulation Tools on Creative Problem Solving: A Dual Pathway to Creativity