Ikujiro Nonaka

Ikujiro Nonaka

  • Submitted By: alina155
  • Date Submitted: 01/28/2009 5:10 PM
  • Category: Biographies
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Thinker Name: Ikujiro Nonaka
Nationality: Japanese

“Innovation process is not simply information processing. It's a process
to capture create, leverage and retain knowledge.”

Ikujiro Nonaka

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935- ) - one of the main progenitors in the field of knowledge management.
In 1995 Ikujiro Nonaka issued “The Knowledge-Creating Company” co-authored by Hirotaka Takeuchi, the book was considered as the worldwide bestseller and won "Best Book of the Year in Business and Management" award. Here Nonaka highlights that the central idea lies in comprehension of what the organisational knowledge is, how it is created and which processes are engaged in this creation. In 1972 Ikujiro Nonaka completed his Phd in University of California Berkley. While studying in UC Berkley initially Nonaka was interested in information processing with the emphasis on marketing, however, over time his eager to study this subject came to the end, namely, after he took a series of sociology courses from Neil Smelser and Arthur Stinchcombe. The second and most reasonable turning point of shifting from information to knowledge arose in a Harvard Business School colloquium on productivity and technology, when Nonaka realized that the process of innovation is not only based on information processing , but also on how organizations create knowledge. Consequently, author came into a point that there are two types of knowledge in organisation: tacit (or implicit) and explicit. Tacit knowledge is one in people’s minds which is hard to express and communicate, whereas explicit can be defined in words and numbers, easily communicated and shared in the form of hard data, scientific formulae, codified procedures, or universal principles. According to Nonaka (1995), these types of knowledge are vital and non-excludable for organisation, at the point where these two types interact implicit knowledge is converted into explicit through four stages of spiralling SECI-model...