Ikujiro Nonaka

Ikujiro Nonaka (野中 郁次郎, Nonaka Ikujirō, born May 10, 1935) is a Japanese organizational theorist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University, best known for his study of knowledge management.

Biography

Nonaka was born in Tokyo in 1935 and as a child he lived through the Japanese defeat during World War II. His nationalist spirit led him to believe that, in order to avoid further humiliation, Japan should adapt its technological and organizational skills. In 1958 Nonaka received his B.S. in political science of Waseda University.

After graduation Nonaka accepted a job in Fuji Electric, where he initiated a management program. This curriculum was in the 1960s further developed together with the business school of Keio University and offered to companies all over Japan.^[1] In 1967 Nonaka moved to US where in 1968 he obtained an MBA and in 1972 a PhD in Business Administration both at University of California, Berkeley.

Nonaka was the First Distinguished Drucker Scholar in Residence at the Drucker School and Institute, Claremont Graduate University; the Xerox Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization, University of California, Berkeley. back in Japan he became Professor at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University,

Work

Works

Nonaka co-authored The Knowledge-Creating Company with Hirotaka Takeuchi. In 2008, the Wall Street Journal listed him as one of the most influential persons on business thinking.,^[2] and The Economist included him in its "Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus".^[3]

The New New Product Development Game

In the article "The New New Product Development Game"^[4] co-authored with Hirotaka Takeuchi a colleague at Hitotsubashi University, he discusses the new emphasis that must be put in speed and flexibility during the development of new products. This article is considered to be the one of the roots of the Scrum development framework, one of the most used agile software development techniques.

The SECI Model

Nonaka has proposed the SECI model, one of the most widely cited theories in knowledge management (Gourlay 2003), to present the spiraling knowledge processes of interaction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.

SECI:

• Socialization
• Externalization
• Combination
• Internalization

Selected Bibliography

• Essence of Failure: Organizational Study of the Japanese Armed Forces during the World War II (with R. Tobe, Y. Teramoto, S. Kamata, T. Suginoo and T. Murai), Tokyo: Diamond-sha, 1984 (in Japanese).
• Nonaka, Ikujiro; Takeuchi, Hirotaka (1995), The knowledge creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 284, ISBN 978-0-19-509269-1 
• Enabling Knowledge Creation (with G. von Krogh and K. Ichijo), New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Hitotsubashi on Knowledge Management (with co-authors), John Wiley (Asia), 2003.
• The Essence of Innovation (with A. Katsumi), Tokyo: Nikkei BP, 2004 (in Japanese).
• The Essence of Strategy (with co-authors), Tokyo: Nikkei BP, 2005 (in Japanese).
• Managing Flow (with T. Hirata and R. Toyama), Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• The Core of Organization is People (with H. Sakai, H. Yoshida, T. Sakikawa, T. Hirata, K. Isomura and Yasunobu NARITA), Kyoto: Nakanishiya, 2009 (in Japanese).
• The Philosophy-Creating Company (with K. Genma, T. Hirata, K. Isomura and Yasunobu NARITA), Kyoto: Nakanishiya, 2012 (in Japanese).

About Ikujiro Nonaka

• Nonaka, Ikujiro (1991), "The knowledge creating company", Harvard Business Review 69 (6 Nov-Dec): 96–104. 
• Gourlay, Stephen (2003), "The SECI model of knowledge creation: some empirical shortcomings", 4th European Conference on Knowledge Management, Oxford, England, 18-19 Sep 2003 
• Strategy Business Magazine article in Winter 2008 issue

References

External links

• Biography at Hitotsubashi University