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

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

Typologies are an important way of organizing the complex cause-effect relationships that are key building blocks of the strategy and organization literatures. Here, I develop a novel theoretical perspective on causal core and periphery, which is based on how elements of a configuration are connected to outcomes. Using data on hightechnology firms, I empirically investigate configurations based on the Miles and Snow typology using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). My findings show how the theoretical perspective developed here allows for a detailed analysis of causal core, periphery, and asymmetry, shifting the focus to midrange theories of causal processes.

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Building Better Causal Theories: A Fuzzy Set Approach to Typologies in Organization Research

Organizational Ambidexterity: Antecedents, Outcomes, and Moderators

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Profitable growth requires organizations to simultaneously increase the efficiency of their current operations and to develop and launch innovative products to ensure future growth. This requires an organizational design that pursues seemingly contradictory demands at the same time: bureaucratic structures to ensure efficiency and organic structures to allow for innovation and growth. Unfortunately, there is still little known about how organizational structures address the paradox between efficiency and innovation. In this paper, four alternative design paths are presented that enable organizations to balance the conflicting organizational requirements of profitable growth. The paper draws upon longitudinal case studies and empirical findings from a research program currently underway at the University of St. Gallen's Center for Organizational Excellence (CORE).

Tapping the Power of Paradox: Organizing for Profitable Growth

The article discusses the theory of the shifting balance perspective of corporate turnarounds, which finds that firms can manage the sequential and simultaneous perspectives' inherent tradeoffs by ...

Neither black nor white yet both: the shifting balance between retrenchment and recovery in corporate turnarounds.

Nestlé: Sustaining Growth in Mature Markets

La crise des entreprises : Existe-t-il une logique commune a l'echec d'entreprises prosperes ? Cette etude empirique, devoile des defaillances vitales dans la gestion de ces entreprises et indique comment les compagnies peuvent se proteger efficacement contre ces crises.

Sebastian Raisch

Papers

Tapping the Power of Paradox: Organizing for Profitable Growth

Neither black nor white yet both: the shifting balance between retrenchment and recovery in corporate turnarounds.

Nestlé: Sustaining Growth in Mature Markets

Crash d'Entreprises: La Logique de l'Echec

Unternehmerische Balance - Nestlés organisches Wachstum in reifen Märkten.