The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of In

The Knowledge-Creating Company by Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi

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Description This book seeks an answer to the question: what are the unique characteristics of Japanese firms in product development behaviour? The authors conclude that Japanese firms uniquely manage knowledge - they create it in the course of product development.

Publisher Description

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 athow 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, andtacit 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 ZenBuddhism, 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 theengineers. 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 abridge 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 sustaininga competitive advantage in the future.Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have attheir 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.

Author Biography

Ikujiro Nonaka is a Professor in School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Hirotaka Takeuchi is a Professor of Management at the Institute of Business Research, Hitosubashi University.

Details ISBN 0195092694 ISBN-13 9780195092691 Title The Knowledge-Creating Company Author Ikujiro Nonaka, Hirotaka Takeuchi Format Hardcover Year 1995 Pages 304 Publisher Oxford University Press Inc GE_Item_ID:137020152; About Us

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