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

Purpose – Knowledge is the currency of the current economy, a vital organisational asset and a key to creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The consequent interest in knowledge management (KM) has spurred an exponential increase in publications covering a broad spectrum of diverse and overlapping research areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review and categorised analysis of the rapidly growing number of KM publications, and offer a comprehensive reference for new-comers embarking on research in the field with a particular focus on the area of knowledge measurement. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 350 articles published in peer-reviewed journals over the last decade are carefully reviewed, analysed and categorised according to their specific subject matter in the KM context. Findings – KM research tends to fall in one of five categories: Ontology of Knowledge and KM, Knowledge Management Systems, Role of Information Technology, Managerial and Social issues, and Kno...

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Knowledge management and measurement: a critical review

Four methods are developed for data mining discrete multi-objective optimization datasets.Two of the methods are unsupervised, one is supervised and the other is hybrid.Knowledge is represented as patterns in one method, and as rules in other methods.Methods are applied to three real-world production system optimization problems.Extracted knowledge is compared across methods and provides new insights. The first part of this paper served as a comprehensive survey of data mining methods that have been used to extract knowledge from solutions generated during multi-objective optimization. The current paper addresses three major shortcomings of existing methods, namely, lack of interactiveness in the objective space, inability to handle discrete variables and inability to generate explicit knowledge. Four data mining methods are developed that can discover knowledge in the decision space and visualize it in the objective space. These methods are (i) sequential pattern mining, (ii) clustering-based classification trees, (iii) hybrid learning, and (iv) flexible pattern mining. Each method uses a unique learning strategy to generate explicit knowledge in the form of patterns, decision rules and unsupervised rules. The methods are also capable of taking the decision makers preferences into account to generate knowledge unique to preferred regions of the objective space. Three realistic production systems involving different types of discrete variables are chosen as application studies. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated for each system and solved using NSGA-II to generate the optimization datasets. Next, all four methods are applied to each dataset. In each application, the methods discover similar knowledge for specified regions of the objective space. Overall, the unsupervised rules generated by flexible pattern mining are found to be the most consistent, whereas the supervised rules from classification trees are the most sensitive to user-preferences.

Data mining methods for knowledge discovery in multi-objective optimization

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss how hospitality organizations can facilitate knowledge management (KM) better through information technology (IT) tools.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is developed based on a synthesis of previous literature.Findings – Knowledge can be seen as one of the key assets for hospitality organizations. Therefore, KM can help hospitality organizations create and sustain a competitive advantage. Use of IT applications can assist in creating, storing, transferring and using tacit and explicit knowledge. Hospitality organizations can use numerous IT tools in their KM practices, which include competency databases, decision support systems, online search systems, expert networks, e‐mail, groupware, teleconference, intranet, WWW, document management systems, video conferences, data warehousing, and workflow software.Research limitations/implications – Rather than looking at IT applications from a tactical and operational point of view, this article suggests that hospitality...

Facilitating knowledge management through information technology in hospitality organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social media may support information encountering i.e. where individuals encounter useful and interesting information while seeking or browsing for some other information and how this may lead to the facilitation of tacit knowledge creation and sharing. The study employed a qualitative survey design that interviewed 24 physicians who were active users of social media to better understand the phenomenon of information encountering on social media. The data was analysed using the thematic analysis approach. The study found six main ways through which social media supports information encountering. Furthermore, drawing upon knowledge creation theories, the study concluded that information encountering on social media facilitates tacit knowledge creation and sharing among individuals. The study provides new directions for further empirical investigations to examine whether information encountering on social media actually leads to tacit knowledge creation and sharing. The findings of the study may also provide opportunities for users to adopt social media effectively or gain greater value from social media use.

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Information encountering on social media and tacit knowledge sharing

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to improve traditional knowledge management models in light of complexity theory, emphasizing the importance of moving away from hierarchical relationships among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.Design/methodology/approach – Traditional definitions and models are critically reviewed and their weaknesses highlighted. A transformational perspective of the traditional hierarchies is proposed to highlight the need to develop better perspectives. The paper demonstrates the holistic nature of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, and how they are all based on an interpretation of existence.Findings – Existing models are logically extended, by adopting a complexity‐based perspective, to propose a new model – the E2E model – which highlights the non‐linear relationships among existence, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment, as well as the nature of understanding as the process that defines the differences among these constructs. The meaning of m...

Reconstituting knowledge management

In this study, kartogenin was incorporated into an electrospun blend of polycaprolactone and poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (1:1) to determine the feasibility of this system for sustained drug delivery. Kartogenin is a small-molecule drug that could enhance the outcome of microfracture, a cartilage restoration procedure, by selectively stimulating chondrogenic differentiation of endogenous bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells. Experimental results showed that kartogenin did not affect the electrospinnability of the polymer blend, and it had negligible effects on fiber morphology and scaffold mechanical properties. The loading efficiency of kartogenin into electrospun membranes was nearly 100%, and no evidence of chemical reaction between kartogenin and the polymers was detected by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Analysis of the released drug using high-performance liquid chromatography–photodiode array detection indicated an abundance of kartogenin and only a small amount of its major hydrolysis product. Kartogenin displayed a typical biphasic release profile, with approximately 30% being released within 24 h followed by a much slower, constant rate of release up to 28 days. Although additional development is needed to tune the release kinetics and address issues common to electrospun scaffolds (e.g., high fiber density), the results of this study demonstrated that a scaffold electrospun from biodegradable synthetic polymers is a suitable kartogenin delivery vehicle.

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Evaluation of Electrospun PCL-PLGA for Sustained Delivery of Kartogenin

Existing models of knowledge processing do not feature a systemic meaning of knowledge management and ignore the role of leadership and social energy in the knowledge processing system (KPS). This conceptual paper introduces the Leadership Invigorating Flows of Energies, (LIFE) Model as an attempt to remedy that situation and provide a more useful description of the KPS. The LIFE Model highlights the role of emergent leadership and flows of social energies as forces encouraging knowledge creation and dynamic diffusion within an organization through the Knowledge Processing Cycle in eight activities interacting with its social knowledge base in a self-organizing system.

Modeling the Knowledge Processing System through the Lens of Complexity Theory : Social Energies, Leadership, and the LIFE Model

A deeper understanding of how organizations behave as social complex adaptive systems is needed. In this paper we demonstrate how the Leadership Invigorating Flows of Energies model can help with this understanding. The model highlights the role of emergent leadership as a force encouraging the creation. diffusion. and utilization of knowledge through self-organizing mechanisms. We illustrate our approach by examining Wikipedia and show how it can be described as a social CAS. Our analysis of Wikipedia describes how emerging intrapreneurship behaviors result in dynamic flows of knowledge and self-organizing feedback mechanisms across the organization. We provide implications for organization studies and present evidence to support claims made by advocates of complexity theory. We conclude by proposing that Wikipedia can be seen as a new form of organization, and finish with a brief note highlighting a possible way forward.

Rob Lawson

Papers

Reconstituting knowledge management

Evaluation of Electrospun PCL-PLGA for Sustained Delivery of Kartogenin

Modeling the Knowledge Processing System through the Lens of Complexity Theory : Social Energies, Leadership, and the LIFE Model

Exploring Knowledge Processing in a Social Complex Adaptive Organization : Wikipedia through the Lens of the LIFE Model