Ikujiro Nonaka

In a world where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. The best companies survive by consistently creating new knowledge, disseminating it widely throughout the organization, and quickly leveraging it in their business processes and their products. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka shows how your company can exploit its knowledge to continually innovate and reinvent itself in the face of relentless change. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

The Knowledge-Creating Company

Hirotaka Takeuchi

High-velocity change is the fundamental challenge facing companies today. Few companies, however, are prepared to continuously innovate-because they focus on the short-term and do not emphasize the wisdom needed to make sure that their interests are aligned with those of society. Practical wisdom is the bases of continuous innovation, where companies ceaselessly and repeatedly creating new knowledge, disseminating it throughout the organization, and converting knowledge to action over time. In The Wise Company, legendary management experts Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi highlight how various companies have confronted the challenge of rapid change to create new products and new ways of doing business that benefit employees, consumers, and society. The key: a relentless self-renewal process where companies realize the future they envisions, rather than only responding to changes in the environment. Nonaka and Takeuchi argue that while knowledge-creating companies focusing on tacit and explicit knowledge can generate innovation, they cannot create it on a continuous and ongoing basis without having wisdom about human interactions and how they influence organizational structures and practices. Companies that have resilience, longevity, and sustainability share a number of characteristics, Nonaka and Takeuchi show. Strategies are based on alignment of organizational and societal benefits. Leaders grasp the core of any situation or problem quickly, and intuitively comprehend the nature and meaning of people, things, and events. But wise leadership is not enough: wisdom must infuse the organization through informal as well as formal shared interactions and communications that focus on metaphors and stories that convey the essence and meaning of strategies and actions. In short, Nonaka and Takeuchi demonstrate how continuous innovation results from companies ceaselessly and repeatedly creating new knowledge, disseminating knowledge throughout the organization, and converting that knowledge to action. The Wise Company presents a new model of knowledge-creation and practice for the twenty-first century.

How Companies Create Continuous Innovation

The Wise Company

Toshihiro Nishiguchi

Social, Technical, and Evolutionary Dimensions of Knowledge Creation

Knowledge Emergence

Florian Kohlbacher

Toru Hirata

Ryoko Toyama

This book presents an ultimate theory of knowledge-based management and organizational knowledge creation based on empirical research and an extensive literature review. It covers the six essential building blocks of this theory using in-depth case studies of companies to illustrate each block.

A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm

Managing Flow

Poche sono le imprese capaci oggi di affrontare la sfida più importante: il cambiamento ad alta velocità. La maggior parte tende infatti a concentrarsi sul breve termine, senza assicurarsi che i loro interessi siano allineati con quelli della società. La chiave di volta per lo sviluppo di una innovazione continua è riuscire a sviluppare una saggezza pratica, plasmata dai valori, dall’etica e dalla morale. Le «imprese sagge» sono, dunque, quelle capaci di incidere sulle relazioni umane per infondere nuove conoscenze nelle pratiche organizzative, convertendole in azione e innovazione continua a livello individuale, aziendale e sociale. Gli autori – riconosciuti come i padri intellettuali del knowledge management, in particolare con l’opera fondamentale The knowledge creating company – declinano questa nuova teoria attraverso le storie di gruppi dinamici, longevi e sostenibili: da Honda a Shimano, da Eisai a Toyota, da Apple a MIT Media Lab. Il minimo comun denominatore di queste realtà è la qualità dei loro leader, che hanno saputo attivare le intere strutture di cui erano a capo per creare nuovi prodotti e nuovi processi, dai quali si sono generati benefici per i collaboratori, i clienti, la comunità e la società. Emerge un modello di leadership umano-centrica, capace di innescare circoli virtuosi di creazione di conoscenza e di attivare l’innovazione quale leva del cambiamento: una leadership che si estende ai vari livelli organizzativi e in grado di generare interazioni efficaci e comunicazioni condivise.

L’impresa saggia. Come le imprese creano l’innovazione continua

Kimio Kase

Eugene Choi

This book offers a meditation on the links between philosophy and its implementation, interpreting why and how a leader's "philosophy" strengthens his action predicated on the purposeful vision of life; and discusses the a hypothesis that performance control in management may be driven by transcendental and intrinsic motivations, contrasting with the traditional management control theory. It construes how Inamori's management philosophy disciplines accounting and finance management towards putting its basic tenets into practice. Examining, in particular, the history of Kyocera, the authors provide a contemplative look at a human centric philosophy, which will be of interest to scholars of management, corporate executives, and economists with a philosophical bent.

A Response to the Profit-Maximisation Paradigm

Dr Kazuo Inamori’s Management Praxis and Philosophy

John Child

Meinolf Dierkes

Ariane Berthoin Antal

This is an overview of how the concept of organisational learning emerged, how it has been used and debated, and where it may be going.

Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge

Jin Chen

Knowledge when properly leveraged and harnessed contributes to effective organizational performance. How much an organization benefits from knowledge would depend on how well knowledge has been managed. There have been challenges to implementing knowledge management in today’s dramatically different world from before. This comprehensive reference work is a timely guide to understanding knowledge management. The book covers key themes of knowledge management which includes the basic framework of knowledge management and helps readers to understand the state of art of knowledge management both from the aspects of theory and practice, from the perspectives of strategy, organization, resources, as well as institution and organizational culture. This reference work reflects the increasingly important role of both philosophy and digital technologies in knowledge management research and practice. This handbook will be an essential resource for knowledge management scholars, researchers and graduate students.

The Routledge Companion to Knowledge Management

Zhichang Zhu

Presents a unique pragmatic framework for shaping and solving strategic problems in a practical, creative and ethical manner.

Eastern Wisdom, Global Success

Pragmatic Strategy

Georg von Krogh

Kazuo Ichijo

When The Knowledge-Creating Company (OUP; nearly 40,000 copies sold) appeared, it was hailed as a landmark work in the field of knowledge management. Now, Enabling Knowledge Creation ventures even further into this all-important territory, showing how firms can generate and nurture ideas by using the concepts introduced in the first book. Weaving together lessons from such international leaders as Siemens, Unilever, Skandia, and Sony, along with their own first-hand consulting experiences, the authors introduce knowledge enabling--the overall set of organizational activities that promote knowledge creation--and demonstrate its power to transform an organization's knowledge into value-creating actions. They describe the five key "knowledge enablers" and outline what it takes to instill a knowledge vision, manage conversations, mobilize knowledge activists, create the right context for knowledge creation, and globalize local knowledge. The authors stress that knowledge creation must be more than the exclusive purview of one individual--or designated "knowledge" officer. Indeed, it demands new roles and responsibilities for everyone in the organization--from the elite in the executive suite to the frontline workers on the shop floor. Whether an activist, a caring expert, or a corporate epistemologist who focuses on the theory of knowledge itself, everyone in an organization has a vital role to play in making "care" an integral part of the everyday experience; in supporting, nurturing, and encouraging microcommunities of innovation and fun; and in creating a shared space where knowledge is created, exchanged, and used for sustained, competitive advantage. This much-anticipated sequel puts practical tools into the hands of managers and executives who are struggling to unleash the power of knowledge in their organization.

How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation

Enabling Knowledge Creation

This book brings together the research of a number of scholars in the field of knowledge creation and imparts a sense of order to the field. The chapters share three characteristics: they are all grounded in extensive qualitative and/or quantitative research; they all go beyond the mere description of the knowledge-creation process and offer both theoretical and strategic implications; they share a view of knowledge creation and knowledge transfer as delicate processes, necessitating particular forms of support from managers.

Ayano Hirose Nishihara

Masaei Matsunaga

Kiyotaka Yokomichi

This book presents a new paradigm of innovative governments in Asia, at the municipal, regional and national levels, based on the knowledge creation theory in management, and leading to organizational transformation and policy reform in public administration. Focusing on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan, the book is based on the findings of a joint research project established to identify the factors that impact the effectiveness or performance of public administration by applying the knowledge-based management theory that originates in private sectors to public sector management.

Innovative Government in Southeast Asia and Japan

Knowledge Creation in Public Administrations

Pragmatism is enjoying a renaissance in management studies and the social sciences. Once written off as amoral, relativist and opposed to the ideals of Truth, Reason and Progress, it is now regaining influence in public policy, international relations and business strategy. But what can pragmatism teach us about strategy? How can pragmatic strategies help businesses to succeed? This innovative book presents a pragmatic framework for shaping and solving strategic problems in a practical, creative, ethical and finely balanced manner. To achieve this, the authors draw from Confucian teaching, American pragmatism and Aristotelian practical wisdom, as well as business cases across industries and nations, particularly from emerging economies. With significant theoretical depth, direct practical implication and profound cultural sensitivity, the book is useful for executive managers, public administrators, strategy researchers and advanced students in the search for pragmatic strategies in an interconnected, fast-moving world.

Ikujiro Nonaka

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