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

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

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

Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Text data such as online news and microblogs bear valuable insights regarding important events and responses to such events. Events are inherently temporal, evolving over time. Existing visual text analysis systems have provided temporal views of changes based on topical themes extracted from text data. But few have associated topical themes with events that cause the changes. In this paper, we propose an interactive visual analytics system, LeadLine, to automatically identify meaningful events in news and social media data and support exploration of the events. To characterize events, LeadLine integrates topic modeling, event detection, and named entity recognition techniques to automatically extract information regarding the investigative 4 Ws: who, what, when, and where for each event. To further support analysis of the text corpora through events, LeadLine allows users to interactively examine meaningful events using the 4 Ws to develop an understanding of how and why. Through representing large-scale text corpora in the form of meaningful events, LeadLine provides a concise summary of the corpora. LeadLine also supports the construction of simple narratives through the exploration of events. To demonstrate the efficacy of LeadLine in identifying events and supporting exploration, two case studies were conducted using news and social media data.

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LeadLine: Interactive visual analysis of text data through event identification and exploration

Analyzing large textual collections has become increasingly challenging given the size of the data available and the rate that more data is being generated. Topic-based text summarization methods coupled with interactive visualizations have presented promising approaches to address the challenge of analyzing large text corpora. As the text corpora and vocabulary grow larger, more topics need to be generated in order to capture the meaningful latent themes and nuances in the corpora. However, it is difficult for most of current topic-based visualizations to represent large number of topics without being cluttered or illegible. To facilitate the representation and navigation of a large number of topics, we propose a visual analytics system - HierarchicalTopic (HT). HT integrates a computational algorithm, Topic Rose Tree, with an interactive visual interface. The Topic Rose Tree constructs a topic hierarchy based on a list of topics. The interactive visual interface is designed to present the topic content as well as temporal evolution of topics in a hierarchical fashion. User interactions are provided for users to make changes to the topic hierarchy based on their mental model of the topic space. To qualitatively evaluate HT, we present a case study that showcases how HierarchicalTopics aid expert users in making sense of a large number of topics and discovering interesting patterns of topic groups. We have also conducted a user study to quantitatively evaluate the effect of hierarchical topic structure. The study results reveal that the HT leads to faster identification of large number of relevant topics. We have also solicited user feedback during the experiments and incorporated some suggestions into the current version of HierarchicalTopics.

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HierarchicalTopics: Visually Exploring Large Text Collections Using Topic Hierarchies

Understanding how analysts use visual-analytics (VA) tools can help reveal their reasoning processes when using these tools. By examining analysts' interaction logs, the authors identified the analysts' strategies, methods, and findings when using a financial VA tool.

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Recovering Reasoning Processes from User Interactions

Scalable and effective analysis of large text corpora remains a challenging problem as our ability to collect textual data continues to increase at an exponential rate. To help users make sense of large text corpora, we present a novel visual analytics system, Parallel-Topics, which integrates a state-of-the-art probabilistic topic model Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with interactive visualization. To describe a corpus of documents, ParallelTopics first extracts a set of semantically meaningful topics using LDA. Unlike most traditional clustering techniques in which a document is assigned to a specific cluster, the LDA model accounts for different topical aspects of each individual document. This permits effective full text analysis of larger documents that may contain multiple topics. To highlight this property of the model, ParallelTopics utilizes the parallel coordinate metaphor to present the probabilistic distribution of a document across topics. Such representation allows the users to discover single-topic vs. multi-topic documents and the relative importance of each topic to a document of interest. In addition, since most text corpora are inherently temporal, ParallelTopics also depicts the topic evolution over time. We have applied ParallelTopics to exploring and analyzing several text corpora, including the scientific proposals awarded by the National Science Foundation and the publications in the VAST community over the years. To demonstrate the efficacy of ParallelTopics, we conducted several expert evaluations, the results of which are reported in this paper.

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ParallelTopics: A probabilistic approach to exploring document collections

Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. One key aspect that separates visual analytics from other related fields (InfoVis, SciVis, HCI) is the focus on analytical reasoning. While the final products generated at from an analytical process are of great value, research has shown that the processes of the analysis themselves are just as important if not more so. These processes not only contain information on individual insights discovered, but also how the users arrive at these insights. This area of research that focuses on understanding a user's reasoning process through the study of their interactions with a visualization is called Analytic Provenance, and has demonstrated great potential in becoming a foundation of the science of visual analytics. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, national labs, and industry to share methods for capturing, storing, and reusing user interactions and insights. We aim to develop a research agenda for how to better study analytic provenance and utilize the results in assisting users in solving real world problems.

Wenwen Dou

Papers

LeadLine: Interactive visual analysis of text data through event identification and exploration

HierarchicalTopics: Visually Exploring Large Text Collections Using Topic Hierarchies

Recovering Reasoning Processes from User Interactions

ParallelTopics: A probabilistic approach to exploring document collections

Analytic provenance: process+interaction+insight