The Knowledge-creating Company by Ikujiro Nonaka

The Knowledge-creating Company by Ikujiro Nonaka

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 with the master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers.

Ikujiro Nonaka is Professor Emeritus of international business strategy at Hitotsubashi University's Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, in Tokyo. He is coauthor, with Hirotaka Takeuchi, of The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781422179741
ISBN 10	1422179745
Title	The Knowledge-creating Company
Author	Ikujiro Nonaka
Series	Harvard Business Review Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Harvard Business Review Press
Year published	2008-11-11
Number of pages	72
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.