Kim B. Clark

Takahiro Fujimoto

Professor Faculty of Economics at University of Tokyo and Senior Research Associate Takahiro Fujimoto

This book is the culmination of six years of research conducted at the Harvard Business School on how different manufacturing firms around the world approach the development of new products. Its principal focus is the impact of strategy, organization, and management on this critical component of business strategy.

Strategy, Organization, and Management in the World Auto Industry

Product Development Performance

This book is intended for manufacturing and engineering professionals and academics.

Evolution of Manufacturing Systems at Toyota

Yannick Lung

Jean-Jacques Chanaron

Daniel Raff

First published in 1999, this book explores pint points, compares and dates the development of product differentiation and variety. This book also analyses’ how firms have embraced a variety of ways of efficiently managing this verity though production, the design of the product as well as in the relations with the suppliers and distributors.

Flexible Productive Systems for Product Variety in the Auto Industry

Coping with Variety

This is an honest look at the origins of lean, written in the words of the people who created the system. Through interviews and annotated talks, you will hear first-person accounts of what these innovators and problem-solvers did and why they did it. You¿ll read rare, personal commentaries that explain the interplay of (sometimes opposing) ideas that created a revolution in thinking.

The Birth of Lean

What is the true source of a firm's long-term competitive advantage in manufacturing? Through original field studies, historical research, and statistical analyses, this book shows how Toyota Motor Corporation, one of the world's largest automobile companies, built distinctive capabilities in production, product development, and supplier management. Fujimoto asserts that it is Toyota's evolutionary learning capability that gives the company its advantage and demonstrates how this learning is put to use in daily work.

The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota

Koichi Shimokawa

Ulrich Jürgens

For the world's leading car-makers, the early 1990s brought radical changes. The reports published by MIT shocked management in European and American industries. Former major companies had to face consequences no one had expected. The assembly-lines were reorganized in order to achieve higher quality at lower costs. Five years after the MIT report, this book poses the question: What are the results of this revolution in work organization? Scientists and practitioners, many of them involved in earlier reports, evaluate the changes to the automotive industry in Europe and Japan. An insight into recent concepts in automation and the organization of production.

Experience in Automation and Work Organization

Transforming Automobile Assembly

Fumihiko Ikuine

This book integrates the concept of design into the existing framework of industrial performance, international trade and comparative advantage in trade and industrial phenomena, which increasingly have been affected by design characteristics of tradable goods. Design, capability and their evolution are introduced into current theories of trade to explain the reality of international trade in the early twenty-first century and the possibility of design-based comparative advantage is explored. Toward that end, the concepts of design, architecture, organizational capability and productivity are introduced, as are their interactions and evolution. The author starts from the fact that firms’ selection of design locations precedes that of production locations and that a new product’s initial production location is usually the same as its design location. In other words, design matters in explaining today’s trade phenomena. Thus, this book analyzes product design and its evolution in the context of the comparative advantage theory. The author argues that the concept of Ricardo’s comparative advantage must be reinterpreted in a more dynamic way than in the past, with changing labor input coefficients treated as variables and driven by international capability-building competition between factories. Some of the many topics dealt with in this volume include a capability-architecture view of industrial comparative advantage, a design-based view of manufacturing, the evolution of manufacturing capabilities, Ricardian comparative advantage with changing labor input coefficients, comparative design cost and selection of design locations and a design process model behind comparative design cost. In this way, the behaviors of factories, product development projects, firms, industries and national economies in today’s global competition are described and analyzed in the most realistic way.

Takahiro Fujimoto

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