Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation [Hardcover]

Georg von Krogh (Author), Kazuo Ichijo (Author), Ikujiro Nonaka (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0195126165 | ISBN-13: 978-0195126167 | Edition: First US Edition

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Enabling Knowledge Creation is not only carefully written and an interesting read, but it is also very practical and action oriented. The book is full of extremely useful frameworks and suggestions as well as case studies of successful companies in Japan, Europe, and the United States. It will clearly become a standard handbook in the knowledge management field."- Michael A. Cusumano, Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of Microsoft Secrets and Competing On Internet Time

"Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka write from the deep and accurate conviction that the most important but hardest part of enabling knowing is nurturing the tacit dimensions of knowledge."- Dorothy A. Leonard, William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

"Enabling Knowledge Creation is a key volume in the new second generation knowledge research texts, well written and researched by three outstanding scholars. It should be studied and absorbed by anyone working with knowledge and knowledge contexts."--Larry Prusak, Executive Director, IBM Institute for Knowledge Management

"Knowledge creation requires an organized effort, says this international author team. They offer a detailed program along with five enablers: a knowledge vision, managed conversations, a team of knowledge activists, a contextual framework, and a distribution process."--Business Reader Review

About the Author

Georg Von Krogh is Professor of Management and member of the board, the Institute of Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. An active consultant, his clients include Hoffman La-Roche, PricewaterhouseCoopers, USB, and Unilever. He lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Kazuo Ichijo is Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University. Author of Management by Values, winner of the Japan Management Association's 1998 Best Book Award, he also works with the leaders of Toyota, General Electric, Fujitsu, Sony, Hitachi, and others, to help them transform their organizations. He lives in Tokyo, Japan. Ikujiro Nonaka is Dean of the School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and is a chaired professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Co-author of the highly acclaimed The Knowledge-Creating Company (OUP), he lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First US Edition edition (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195126165
• ISBN-13: 978-0195126167
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #646,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Knowledge Enabling not KM !!, June 18, 2002

By 

Gautam Ghosh "voracious reader" (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation (Hardcover)

I had a pleasant surprise when a friend of mine decided to gift me "Enabling Knowledge Creation" by Georg Von Krogh, Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka. It forms a sequel to "the Knowledge Creating Company" co-authored by Nonaka and Takeuchi published in 1995 . The first book was a seminal work which has profoundly influenced my views on Knowledge Creation (Nonaka refuses to entertain the concept of KM , resolutely denying that Knowledge
can ever be managed!) along with writers like Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak. However, the first book was open to a lot of criticism saying that it was just too "theoretic", "vague" and "generalised" ...Nonaka et al try and get more hands on, and tool bookish with this book.

However, this book is likely to disturb people who have read and formed ideas about KM by reading works of the American thought leaders.

In the start of the book the authors try and make the difference explicit.

In a passage titled "what's wrong with knowledge management?" they spell it out :

Pitfall I: KM relies on easily detectable, quantifiable information.
Pitfall II: KM is devoted to the manufacture of tools.
Pitfall III: KM depends on a Knowledge Officer.

While the premises of Knowledge Enabling and Creation are:

Premise I: Knowledge is justified true belief, individual and social, tacit and explicit.
Premise II: Knowledge depends on your perspective.
Premise III: Knowledge Creation is a craft , not a science.

The authors reiterate that organizational Knowledge Creation involves five main steps :

1. Sharing tacit knowledge
2. Creating concepts
3. Justifying concepts
4. Building a prototype
5. Cross-leveling knowledge.

To facilitate this the following 5 enablers need to be in place :

1. instill a knowledge vision
2. manage conversations
3. mobilize knowledge activits
4. Create the right context
5. Globalize local knowledge

The book is rich in case studies which show how different companies that follow these concepts are growing in leaps and bounds and innovating over others who remain stuck in the KM paradigm.

The authors note that in the Knowledge journey companies can be mapped in 3 phases, which might or might not be sequential.

1. The Risk Minimisers , whose focus is capturing and locating knowledge. The tools they use are data warehousing, datamining, Yellow pages, IC-Navigator, Balanced Scorecard, Knowledge Audits, IC-Index, Business Information Systems, Rule-based systems [these firms still view knowledge as a resource that needs to be collected and managed]

2. The Efficiency Seekers, who focus on transferring and sharing knowledge. The tools they use are internets, intranets, Lotus Notes/Groupware, Networked organization, knowledge workshops, knowledge workbench, Best Practice Transfer, Benchmarking, Knowledge-gap analysis, Knowledge sharing culture, Technology transfer units, Knowledge transfer units, Systems Thinking

3. The Innovators who enable Knowledge creation are typically those who embrace a knowledge vision, managing conversations, creating the right context, mobilize knowledge activists, globalize local knowledge, professional innovation networks, new organizational forms, New HRM-systems, new corporate values, project management systems, corporate universities, communities and storyboards.

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Knowledge creation is a craft, not a science.", May 10, 2000

By 

Turgay BUGDACIGIL (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation (Hardcover)

"This is a book about knowledge enabling." Georg Von Krogh, Kazou Ichijo, and Ikujiro Nonaka write, "It is our strong conviction that knowledge cannot be managed, only enabled...From our perspective, managers need to support knowledge creation rather than control it...This book provides new concepts about how knowledge in organizations can be created and used for competitive advantage by describing knowledge-enabling conditions...In Enabling Knowledge Creation, we move beyond the current limitations of knowledge-management theory to discuss practical approaches to the amorphous, constantly evolving, human realm of knowledge. We identify five knowledge enablers- (1)instill a knowledge vision, (2)manage conversations, (3)mobilize knowledge activists, (4)create the right context, and (5)globalize local knowledge- weaving in detailed stories from Siemens, Skandia, Shiseido, Sony, Phonak, Adtranz, General Electric, and other companies (such as 3M, Nokia, Intel, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Lotus, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hoffmann-La Roche, and Glaxo Wellcome)."

In this context Von Krogh, Ichijo, and Nonaka :

* describe and discuss individual and organizational barriers to knowledge creation.

* examine the three pitfalls of a knowledge-management approach in more detailed :

Pitfall-1. Knowledge management relies on easily detectable, quantifiable information.

Pitfall-2. Knowledge management is devoted to the manufacture of tools.

Pitfall-3. Knowledge management depends on a knowledge officer.

* present the three counter premises of knowledge enabling :

Premise-1. Knowledge is justified true belief, individual and social, tacit and explicit.

Premise-2. Knowledge depends on your perspective.

Premise-3. Knowledge creation is a craft, not a science.

* present more general ideas about care in organizations and the role it plays in knowledge creation.

* focus on how a company's strategy can be connected to knowledge enabling.

* discuss how campanies develop their knowledge visions.

* describe the five key "knowledge enablers" more precisely.

As sequel to "The Knowledge-Creating Company / I. Nonaka, H. Takeuchi", I highly recommend this much anticipated study.

77 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Focus on knowledge creation, but what about integration?, May 29, 2000

By 

Amrit Tiwana "www.bus.iastate.edu/tiwana" (Decatur, Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation (Hardcover)

The author's of this book are leading thinkers in the KM field. Perhaps the best way to describe this book is as a sequel to Nonaka's earlier 1995 book. But, we all remember what happened to Scarlett, again a much touted sequel. Although this book was a slight disappointment since Nonaka has set reader's expectations a little too high with his earlier groundbreaking title "The Knowledge Creating ompany" that, for the most part, defined KM as we know it. An academic reader will appreciate they theoretical insights provided and extensive references to supporting literature. But there are some aspects that this book underplays: 1. Knowledge creation is fine, but knowledge integration is perhaps as important---an issue to which the authors pay little attention. 2. Excellent ideas aside, this book underplays the significance of empirical evidence and most cases tend to be descriptive qualitative analyses. 3. The role of technology is highly underplayed. 4. The book has "sufficient" overlap with the authors' research papers in the uropean Management Journal. For academic readers who have read those, this might be a little disappointing. 5. The concept of KM and it's relationship with innovation at architectural and component levels is not described in much detail.

On the positive side, you will find that: 1) Lots of issues that were barely touched upon in Nonaka's preceding book are described in further detail. 2) The book is very well written and the tone is accsible to both academic and non-academic readers. 3) the concept of BA is elucidated in further detail Readers who do not follow academic research journals might find that an interesting extension. 4) A link between strategy and KM is well illustrated. For businesses, KM is of little value if there are no results. The authors describe how to look for those results (or in lay terms, ROI). Academic readers will also find Nonaka's recent paper in a recent issue of Organization Science (2000) to be of much interest. Academic readers must also realize that the approach here seems to be "post modern," and indeed quite qualitative in the European research tradition.

To sum my opinion, this book is a worthy addition to the bookshelves; but, it is not to be read without reading Nonaka's preceding book "The Knowledge Creating Company." A word of warning is in order: Academic readers will enjoy this title however, managerial readers might find it a little heavy and abstract. Indeed, this book stands out of the crowd with three authors who are well respected in the American research circles---consequently, its high overall quality comes as no surprise. Recommended.