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

Lincoln, Yvonna, and Egon Guba, "Postpositivism and the Naturalist Paradigm," pp. 14-46 in Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.*

Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

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

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

Correspondence Tua Björklund, Design Factory, PO Box 17700, 00076 Aalto, Finland Email: tua.bjorklund@aalto.fi Abstract Collaboration through innovation is central to the discussion of how today's universities can respond to new interdiscipli‐ nary challenges, competitive environments and stakeholder complexity. Innovation hubs represent a dynamic example of how the public sector, including higher education, is re‐ sponding to the need for new methods and perspectives that foster desired intra‐institutional change. This study ex‐ amines one of these types of platforms, the Design Factory Global Network originating at Aalto University, in order to shed light on key enablers and barriers to furthering collabo‐ rative efforts within higher education. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews with 17 Design Factories, including perspectives from students, staff and educators, the findings show that institutional policy fostering flexibility, securing a physical cross‐disciplinary and multi‐purpose collaborative space, upper level support and building community are all vital in ensuring design‐driven experimentation that contributes to the effectiveness of higher education.

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Learning across silos: Design Factories as hubs for co‐creation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in managerial activities and challenges at different phases of innovative projects. Design/methodology/approach – Six NPD project managers were interviewed in three different project phases in a qualitative, longitudinal design. The resulting 18 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were content analyzed and categorized according to thematic similarity. Findings – Altogether 19 categories describing managerial concerns in managing innovative projects were recognized. Task-oriented, rather than people-oriented, approaches were dominant throughout the projects, although the reported concerns clearly varied at each phase. The early development phase emerged as a transition point, where managers had to transform their roles, reported activities decreased, and reported challenges increased. Research limitations/implications – Although based on a small number of participants in a single setting, the results highlight the need for longitudinal studi...

Adapting to the changing needs of managing innovative projects

In universities, development as a teacher may be contradicted with developing as a researcher. Most previous studies have investigated pedagogical development merely as a result of pedagogical training and ignored the dual teacher-researcher identity. This study examines what kind of meaningful experiences are perceived to have triggered and influenced the process of developing as a teacher in the fields of science and technology. The data were gathered by interviewing 10 academics who had participated in a pedagogical training offered by a Finnish technical university between 1999 and 2009. Based on a narrative analysis utilizing dimensions of transformative learning, the results highlight the influence of the working environment and experiences, and imply that teacher development process in the fields of science and technology can be better understood in terms of becoming a teacher, rather than as a continual, conscious development process. The resulting teacher-researcher identity provides a basis for ...

Developing as a teacher in the fields of science and technology

To develop innovative solutions that fit end-users, engineers must understand the end-users' needs. This user-centered aspect of engineering innovation has been highlighted in recent design thinking literature, where the construct of empathy has received increasing attention. Anecdotal support has been found for the benefits of empathy in engineering, and many engineering design thinking courses today teach engineering students to empathize with end-users. However, transitioning from anecdotal to evidence-based education requires being able to measure and track the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that educators attempt to impart on students. Thus, this study measures the development of empathic tendencies and innovation attitudes in students, and explores correlations between the two. Data was collected by administering a self-report survey in January and June 2017 to 237 students participating in a global multidisciplinary design thinking course. The survey included subscales for empathic tendencies, innovation self-efficacy, and innovation interests. The responses were analyzed for differences in distribution between the two surveys, as well as for correlations between items. It was observed that the students' empathic tendencies and confidence in experimenting and associative thinking grew (p < 0.03). Furthermore, the empathic tendency scores displayed weak but statistically significant correlation with interest towards planning and research activities (p 0.2). This study is among the first to quantify the development of empathy and innovation attitudes in engineering education. The results indirectly repeat prior research on the development of innovation capabilities in the scope of individual engineering courses. However, there are some limitations regarding the applicability of the utilized survey instruments, thus requiring further research with larger amounts of data and a mixed-methods approach to generalize the results.

/pdf/assessing-the-development-of-empathy-and-innovation-3ar3jxcnze.pdf

Tua Björklund

Papers

Learning across silos: Design Factories as hubs for co‐creation

Adapting to the changing needs of managing innovative projects

Developing as a teacher in the fields of science and technology

Assessing the development of empathy and innovation attitudes in a project-based engineering design course

Aalto University Design Factory in the eyes of its community