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

Individualism and collectivism

Online feedback mechanisms harness the bidirectional communication capabilities of the Internet to engineer large-scale, word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are poised to have a much wider impact on organizations. Their growing popularity has potentially important implications for a wide range of management activities such as brand building, customer acquisition and retention, product development, and quality assurance. This paper surveys our progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that these mechanisms represent. It discusses some important dimensions in which Internet-based feedback mechanisms differ from traditional word-of-mouth networks and surveys the most important issues related to their design, evaluation, and use. It provides an overview of relevant work in game theory and economics on the topic of reputation. It discusses how this body of work is being extended and combined with insights from computer science, management science, sociology, and psychology to take into consideration the special properties of online environments. Finally, it identifies opportunities that this new area presents for operations research/management science (OR/MS) research.

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The Digitization of Word of Mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online Feedback Mechanisms

The Study of Man. By Michael Polanyi. Price, $1.75. Pp. 102. University of Chicago Press, 5750 Ellis Ave., Chicago 37, 1959. One subtitle to Polanyi's challenging and fascinating book might be The Evolution and Natural History of Error , for Polanyi is at pains to expunge what he believes to be the false notion contained in the contemporary view of science which treats it as an object and basically impersonal discipline. According to Polanyi not only is this a radical and important error, but it is harmful to the objectives of science itself. Another subtitle could be Farewell to Detachment , for in place of cold objectivity he develops the idea that science is necessarily intensely personal. It is a human endeavor and human point of view which cannot be divorced from nor uprooted out of the human matrix from which it arises and in which it works. For a good while

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

While the technology acceptance model (TAM), introduced in 1986, continues to be the most widely applied theoretical model in the IS field, few previous efforts examined its accomplishments and limitations. This study traces TAM’s history, investigates its findings, and cautiously predicts its future trajectory. One hundred and one articles published by leading IS journals and conferences in the past eighteen years are examined and summarized. An openended survey of thirty-two leading IS researchers assisted in critically examining TAM and specifying future directions.

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The Technology Acceptance Model: Past, Present, and Future

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) application is an enterprise-wide package that tightly integrates all necessary business functions into a single system with a shared database. An ERP implementation often entails transferring the business knowledge incorporated in the basic architecture of the software package into the adopting organization. This article proposes a new approach to analysing ERP implementations from a knowledge transfer perspective. It also contributes to a better understanding of competitive advantage based on process knowledge when standardized business processes are implemented by an organization. The article begins by identifying the types of knowledge transferred during an ERP implementation and the factors affecting this transfer. It then investigates how conflicts between the business knowledge transferred from the ERP package and the existing organizational knowledge are resolved. During our investigation, we used in-depth interviews, process analysis and documentation analysis in order to analyse an early implementation stage of ERP. The results indicated that the business processes which are incorporated in an ERP package are transferred into an organization along with the business rules inherent in the processes due to process automation, the limited flexibility of such packages and the cross-functional nature of an ERP package. The results also suggested that an organization's adaptive capability concerning role and responsibility redistribution, the development of new types of required knowledge and the introduction of a different knowledge structure influence an organization's ability to internalize these standardized processes into business routines that provide a competitive advantage.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1080%2F02683960010009060.pdf

An ERP implementation case study from a knowledge transfer perspective

Purpose – As the number of organizations that have implemented enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) systems unsuccessfully increase, it is necessary to establish the impediments in ERP implementations and the extent to which these impact the success of ERP projects. This study aims to identify the critical impediments that large organizations face in the implementation of ERP systems, and the impact of these impediments on overall success of ERP projects by a survey of Fortune 500 organizations.Design/methodology/approach – A survey was prepared based on 47 impediments identified from previous ERP implementation studies.Findings – This study finds that most of critical impediments are from functional coordination problems related to inadequate support from functional units and coordination among functional units, the project management related to business process change, and change management related to resistance of users. In this study, impediments are categorized based on project phases, and differences i...

Impediments to successful ERP implementation process

Social influence on technology acceptance behavior has been acknowledged but needs to be further articulated. While Subjective Norm (SN) has been dominantly used to capture the essence of social influence, the findings to date has led some researchers to question whether it captures the full extent of social influence. Recently, social psychologists have examined Self-Identity as a construct reflecting social influence on behavior. In particular, Self-Identity has been shown to have significant influence on voluntary behavior and have enduring effects, situations where the Subjective Norm had little effect. This study examines the effect of Self-Identity on technology acceptance decision in the context of a web-based class support system under the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The result demonstrates a significant direct and indirect effect of Self-Identity on technology acceptance. The result also confirms that Self-Identity has significant direct effect on the acceptance in voluntary and experienced situations, while Subjective Norm has no significant effect in both situations. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Social influence on technology acceptance behavior: self-identity theory perspective

The Internet has great potential as a medium to reach consumers but we still need to improve our understanding of the impact of IT on information asymmetries governing buyer and seller positions. In this study we are primarily interested in exploring differences in pricing strategies between physical and electronic markets, across product categories and over time, and to understand the reasons for these differences. Choosing a homogenous product--music compact disks, we compare prices, price dispersion and price dynamics on the Internet with brick-and-mortar retailers. We collected price information for 21 current-hits and 23 old-hits albums from top five nationally-known brick-and-mortar CD retailers and nine on-line stores, and repeated the data collection one year later Overall, 905 data points, 572 from the Internet and 333 from brick-and-mortar retail shops were collected. We find that: 1) The Internet market continues to show price dispersion despite the apparently near zero search costs for consumers and the growth of market size; 2) Brick-and-mortar markets execute more consistent and dominant short-term discount strategies for current-hit albums, and as a result, CD prices for old-hit albums are cheaper in the Internet market as was found in other studies, but CD prices for current-hit albums in the physical markets are comparable to prices in the Internet market, and; 3) Price dynamics alter over time with Internet retailers offering cheaper prices for albums and apparently employing more frequent and finer price changes. The results suggest that it is important to look at dynamic price behavior and product portfolio issues when trying to characterize pricing strategy in this media. We propose that IT's role in segmenting customers to extract greater consumer surplus, as well as differences in consumer base and preferences and seller cost structures and differentiation strategies, need to be carefully examined to explain price dispersion and dynamic price behavior. Introduction The growing population of Internet users provides a large consumer base for businesses to target. Businesses have responded by increasing their visibility on this medium, and some have tried to move parts of their value chains onto the Internet. Clearly, the Internet has a great potential as a medium to reach consumers. However, our understanding about the Internet as market is still in infancy (Bakos 1998). We need to examine the effectiveness of this medium in effectively disseminating price information to produce efficient markets. We are also interested in investigating how Internet pricing strategy has been set up in a way that is different from the brick-and-mortar market. Above all, we are interested in seeing how pricing strategies of sellers in Internet markets will impact market efficiency. Using the music compact disk (CD) market, we empirically test how the expected efficient pricing is borne out in practice and how the pricing strategies of on-line retail shops are different from traditional markets as they adjust to the new environment. Two categories of albums--current hits and old hits based on the expectation that they have distinctive pricing patterns due to differences in volumes, price sensitivity and customer segment appeal are collected at two different points in time, in the expectation that we would observe the dynamic pricing strategies in the two markets. Through this effort we hope to acquire a better understanding of the difference in strategies utilized by conventional stores and on-line sites. Theoretical Underpinnings One theme consistently discussed in the electronic markets literature is that, with the advent of electronic markets, the buyer will be better off in extracting a share of the sellers' profit (Benjamin & Wigand 1995). It is expected that a reduction of consumer search costs would occur through information technology (Bakos 1997). …

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A Longitudinal Price Comparison For Music CD's In Electronic and Brick-and-Mortar Markets: Pricing Strategies In Emergent Electronic Commerce

http://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1119&context=icis2000

Zoonky Lee

Papers

An ERP implementation case study from a knowledge transfer perspective

Impediments to successful ERP implementation process

Social influence on technology acceptance behavior: self-identity theory perspective

A Longitudinal Price Comparison For Music CD's In Electronic and Brick-and-Mortar Markets: Pricing Strategies In Emergent Electronic Commerce

The effect of negative buyer feedback on prices in Internet auction markets