Creating New Knowledge the Japanese Way

Given the sweeping changes happening across the business world with regard to more collaborative forms of learning and open innovation, companies are increasingly looking for better ways to foster new knowledge, seeing it as a key source of value creation and competitive advantage beyond the mere pursuit of profit maximization. Two decades since publishing his seminal book, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka revisits those theories and outlines a series of steps that companies and their leaders can take to create a more fertile environment for new knowledge creation, based on the Japanese concept of ba. What’s needed, he says, is nothing less than a completely new way of perceiving and executing the role of management.