This paper draws on the social and behavioral sciences in an endeavor to specify the nature and microfoundations of the capabilities necessary to sustain superior enterprise performance in an open economy with rapid innovation and globally dispersed sources of invention, innovation, and manufacturing capability. Dynamic capabilities enable business enterprises to create, deploy, and protect the intangible assets that support superior long- run business performance. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities—the distinct skills, processes, procedures, organizational structures, decision rules, and disciplines—which undergird enterprise-level sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capacities are difficult to develop and deploy. Enterprises with strong dynamic capabilities are intensely entrepreneurial. They not only adapt to business ecosystems, but also shape them through innovation and through collaboration with other enterprises, entities, and institutions. The framework advanced can help scholars understand the foundations of long-run enterprise success while helping managers delineate relevant strategic considerations and the priorities they must adopt to enhance enterprise performance and escape the zero profit tendency associated with operating in markets open to global competition. Copyright  2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance

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

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

The paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in interactive learning processes. It questions the view that tacit knowledge transfer is confined to local milieus whereas codified knowledge may roam the globe almost frictionlessly. The paper highlights the conditions under which both tacit and codified knowledge can be exchanged locally and globally. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there dubbed buzz and, on the other, the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication called pipelines to selected providers located outside the local milieu. It is argued that the co-existence of high levels of buzz and many pipelines may provide firms located in outward-looking and lively clusters with a string of particular advantages not available to outsiders. Finally, some policy implications, stemming from this argumen...

/pdf/clusters-and-knowledge-local-buzz-global-pipelines-and-the-29bsuyvekg.pdf

Clusters and knowledge: local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

SECI, Ba and Leadership: a Unified Model of Dynamic Knowledge Creation

This paper is a part of our attempt to build a new knowledge-based theory of the firm and organization to explain the dynamic process of knowledge creation and utilization. For this, we revisit the theory of knowledge creation through the SECI process and ba, and try to advance them further by incorporating the dialectic thinking. In this paper, knowledge creation is conceptualized as a dialectical process, in which various contradictions are synthesized through dynamic interactions among individuals, the organization, and the environment. With the view of a firm as a dialectic being, and strategy and organization should be re-examined as the synthesizing and selftranscending process instead of a logical analysis of structure or action. An organization is not an information-processing machine that is composed of small tasks to carry out a given task, but an organic configuration of ba. Ba, which is conceptualized as a shared context in motion, can transcend time, space, and organization boundaries to create knowledge.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.kmrp.8500001.pdf

The knowledge-creating theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing process

The knowledge-based view of the firm views a firm as a knowledge-creating entity, and argues that knowledge and the capability to create and utilize such knowledge are the most important source of a firm's sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge and skills give a firm a competitive advantage because it is through this set of knowledge and skills that a firm is able to innovate new products/processes/services, or improve existing ones more efficiently and/or effectively. The raison d'etre of a firm is to continuously create knowledge. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.

A firm as a knowledge-creating entity: a new perspective on the theory of the firm

The theory of the knowledge-creating firm explains the differences among firms not as a result of market failure, but as a result of the firm's visions of the future and strategy. This paper proposes a framework to capture the dynamic process of knowledge creation in which knowledge is created through the dynamic interaction between subjectivity and objectivity. Knowledge is created through the synthesis of thinking and actions of individuals, who interact with each other within and beyond the organizational boundaries.

The theory of the knowledge-creating firm : subjectivity, objectivity and synthesis

Today, firms are facing many contradictions: efficiency versus creativity; exploitation versus exploration; speed versus time-consuming resource building. This paper argues that a firm's capability to synthesize such contradictions is the key to understanding why a firm can be more efficient at producing knowledge than market. A firm can create new knowledge and capability that go beyond the balancing point in the existing frontier with its synthesizing capability, which is embedded in its knowledge vision, its ba, its creative routines, its incentive systems and its distributed leadership. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

Ryoko Toyama

Papers

SECI, Ba and Leadership: a Unified Model of Dynamic Knowledge Creation

The knowledge-creating theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing process

A firm as a knowledge-creating entity: a new perspective on the theory of the firm

The theory of the knowledge-creating firm : subjectivity, objectivity and synthesis

A firm as a dialectical being: towards a dynamic theory of a firm