ABSTRACT
Nonaka Ikujiro has won a worldwide reputation for his work on knowledge management and creation. His book The Knowledge-Creating Company (1995) (published in Japan as Chishiki Sozo Kigyo), co-written with Takeuchi Hirotaka, was an international best-seller and received a number of major awards. Although his work only came to Western attention with this publication in 1995, Nonaka had for many years been studying how successful Japanese companies create and use knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. His concept of the ‘hypertext organisation’ was seen as an important model comparable to the ‘learning organisation’ of Arie de Geus and Peter Senge. He is one of Japan’s foremost management scholars, and along with Ohmae Kenichi is one of the Japanese writers on management most widely read in the West.
