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

Measurement of the process of innovation is critical for both practitioners and academics, yet the literature is characterized by a diversity of approaches, prescriptions and practices that can be confusing and contradictory. Conceptualized as a process, innovation measurement lends itself to disaggregation into a series of separate studies. The consequence of this is the absence of a holistic framework covering the range of activities required to turn ideas into useful and marketable products. We attempt to address this gap by reviewing the literature pertaining to the measurement of innovation management at the level of the firm. Drawing on a wide body of literature, we first develop a synthesized framework of the innovation management process consisting of seven categories: inputs management, knowledge management, innovation strategy, organizational culture and structure, portfolio management, project management and commercialization. Second, we populate each category of the framework with factors empirically demonstrated to be significant in the innovation process, and illustrative measures to map the territory of innovation management measurement. The review makes two important contributions. First, it takes the difficult step of incorporating a vastly diverse literature into a single framework. Second, it provides a framework against which managers can evaluate their own innovation activity, explore the extent to which their organization is nominally innovative or whether or not innovation is embedded throughout their organization, and identify areas for improvement.

/pdf/innovation-management-measurement-a-review-2ulub0c559.pdf

Innovation management measurement: A review

Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization

Understanding the small business sector

Auditing best practice for effective product innovation management

An Ontology Model for Systems Engineering Derived from ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288: 2015: Systems and Software Engineering - System Life Cycle Processes

Modern organisations are under ever increasing competitive pressure to maintain market share, enhance product range, improve efficiency and reduce cost. The process by which organisations attain these improvements is through innovation. Over recent years, significant research has focused on the issue of managing the process of developing ideas towards eventual organisational innovations. However, the process by which these ideas are generated and effectively managed is one which currently operates in an "ad hoc" fashion. This paper strives to present a structured and holistic approach to managing idea generation. A literary survey of both innovation and creativity is undertaken to determine their inter-relationships and core traits. Following this, a methodology is presented to facilitate the organisational management of the "Idea Generation" process. An integrated software tool to support the process is also introduced. The purpose of this tool is to provide an infrastructure for the effective management of ideas and their transfer to the larger innovation process.

/pdf/idea-management-for-organisational-innovation-2drnpik8cr.pdf

Idea management for organisational Innovation

In order to create and deliver innovative new products and services at an ever increasing rate, manufacturing enterprises must adopt a deliberate and systematic approach to managing the drivers of innovation. Managing the enterprise's knowledge base and converting intellectual capital into useful products and services is fast becoming the critical executive skill of the age. With this in mind, our research focuses on adopting a knowledge management approach to product innovation management. This papers introduces the concept of knowledge management for product innovation and presents a collaborative knowledge management tool specifically designed to enable product innovation management in a distributed manufacturing environment.

https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10379/4093/mim_2000.pdf?sequence=4

Kathryn Cormican

Papers

Auditing best practice for effective product innovation management

An Ontology Model for Systems Engineering Derived from ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288: 2015: Systems and Software Engineering - System Life Cycle Processes

Idea management for organisational Innovation

A Collaborative Knowledge Management Tool for Product Innovation

Ontology-based systems engineering: A state-of-the-art review