Search results

To produce rapid innovation, Japanese companies have learned to manage strategic communities for new product development. These communities require the merging and integration of different technologies and the coordination of relationships among all levels of management, alliance partners, and customers.

Through case studies of two Japanese companies, the author examines the successful new product development process practised by these strategic communities and their networks.

As the cases reveal, strategic teams at each company – consisting mainly of cross‐functional middle managers from a number of business divisions – formed strategic communities inside and outside the companies that included customers, and then formed networks that transcended the strategic communities' boundaries. In record time, strategic community leaders enabled companies to build new business models aimed at customers and then achieve successful new product development.

Two case studies are reported on. The author was directly involved in one of them.

As this research indicates, to successfully innovate, companies may need to form strategic communities that are not tied to existing organizational structures or cultures. Superior core technology in the leading‐edge high‐tech fields of IT and e‐commerce continues to spread throughout the world and undergo dramatic changes. Innovative companies that need to establish competitive advantage in the network economy must not try to retain full control over innovative processes under the conditions of conventional hierarchical mechanisms and closed autonomous systems. In other words, companies will from now on probably increasingly require a management that can use networked strategic communities to synthesize superior knowledge that is open and spread out both inside and outside the organization, including customers.

Companies will from now on probably increasingly require a management that can use networked strategic communities to synthesize superior knowledge that is open and spread out both inside and outside the organization, including customers.

This paper describes the importance of strategic community creation as a new management style. It verifies that video‐based information networks utilizing information and multimedia technologies enhance the quality of competencies and knowledge possessed by strategic communities, and it also verifies, through case studies, these networks are valid as organizational learning support systems within the strategic communities. Innovations in the area of veterinary medicine utilizing video‐based information networks over the past four years in Japan are taken as examples. This paper describes how knowledge and competencies within strategic communities comprising “industry, government, and academia” are enhanced, how the new virtual methods of telemedicine and distance learning are incorporated into the business process, and how “concepts of regionally linked cooperative bodies” are realized.

For the last few years, the videoconferencing system market represented by multimedia technology has enjoyed strong growth in Japan. Behind the recent upturn in this market was the strategic alliance of NTT, Japan’s largest telecommunications carrier, and PictureTel of the USA, followed by the birth of business communities centered around or outside NTT, thus intensively creating and boosting a new market referred to as video communication. This article reviews the challenges that faced NTT, one of the big businesses in Japan, followed by PictureTel and other players within and outside NTT, all of which were lined up to create various strategic business communities. The article gives careful consideration to the measures taken by these players who achieved success in such a way as to alter employee consciousness, vitalize organizational morale, entrench the new NTT “Phoenix” brand (videoconferencing system) in the Japanese market and create an emergent video network market.

The article will propose strategic community management as a new management style and innovation technique for large, established companies, that is implemented through the creation of a variety of strategic business communities. The article will take up, as a new model case of the use of strategic community management in business, the expansion of Japan’s multimedia communication market achieved by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Inc. (hereafter, NTT), Japan’s largest telecommunications carrier, over roughly the past four years. The article will explain how NTT cultivated this new multimedia market, which was spawned from its creation of business communities (both internal and external, and including communities with customers) using strategic outsourcing and various strategic partnerships with businesses in other industries.

Aims to provide new practical viewpoints regarding the knowledge management and leadership theory of corporate innovation through an in‐depth case study.

Argues that community leaders can develop a business concept of a strategic community comprised of diverse types of business and process to achieve business innovation. Studies a mobile phone business in Japan towards mobile multimedia revolution that illustrates the new product and service development as an instance of the latest business case of networked strategic communities.

Community leaders serve an important function in creating networked strategic communities. The case study shows how community leaders have created networked strategic communities in which telecom carrier, contents providers, terminal manufacturers, platform vendors and international carriers take part in the business development of new mobile multimedia services.

Provides new practical viewpoints regarding the knowledge management and leadership theory of corporate innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the management of strategic public sector risks in communities and municipalities.

This research collates information on public sector risk management through a series of key informant interviews and content analysis of municipal plans.

Financial, environmental, social and other strategic risks were found to be important by communities but not necessarily managed as part of the strategic planning process.

The paper explores the question: what are the strategic risks that communities report on and how they are managed? What risks are identified in communities and how they are managed, if they have significant practical and social implications.

It is an interesting time to study public sector risk management. From a regional policy development perspective, public sector organizations will be facing substantial strategic risks in the coming years due to demographic changes (implications of the graying population), urbanization, economic downturns (or booms in certain regions of North America), as well as changes from advances in technology and communication.

Presents a case study of how over the last six years a large, traditional corporation simultaneously created new service markets and established a dominant position in the competitive information and communication technology field in Japan. The corporation accepted a new organizational body that has an entrepreneurial spirit and consists of different types of personnel, then continuously promoted emergent strategies. At the same time, in an attempt to implement strategic innovation the company integrated the above strategies with deliberate strategies practised by the existing line organizational body. Through a case study, discusses the factors for success and the problems encountered in the course of achieving strategic innovation in the communications field, i.e. the creation of a new market through the creation of strategic communities based on cooperation between different organizations.

This empirical paper aims to show how communities of practice have been used as a tractable management tool to operationalize strategy in practice. The analysis shows how CoPs can be used in business to find traction in order to achieve strategic goals.

A two‐year longitudinal case study approach was adopted employing semi‐structured interviews, participant observations and document analysis for data collection. The findings were verified with the participants in the study during feedback events organised for that purpose.

The study provides in‐depth insights into the challenges of translating strategy into practice in complex work settings. In this case, uneven outcomes were attributed to three critical contributing factors: the leadership and governance structures, the meaningful ways in which members can participate and interact with others; and their identity and sense of belonging.

Although a single case study only provides indications of potential generalisations, it does give access to issues that cannot be identified without an in‐depth analysis.

The authors encourage executives to consider concepts of identity, participation and governance as useful heuristics for the analysis of practices of communities. Potential inconsistencies in community practices could have implications for the way strategy is translated into action.

Unlike most community of practice studies, which focus on the community aspect of the concept, this study analyses the practices of communities. In doing so, it adds value to our understanding of the forces that shape social interactions embedded in the implementation of strategy in practice.

For the various cyber businesses of the future based on the Internet, multimedia and other new electronic fields, business organization styles, management methods and the distribution of management resources must be re‐structured to accommodate the transformation of the business environment. This article examines the case of a virtual education business in Japan, which has recently been garnering attention as a knowledge‐based business that utilizes multimedia, networks, etc. It considers how Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan’s largest telecommunications carrier, created business communities based on strategic partnerships with various customers, and how then, through customer value creation‐model businesses based on knowledge innovation within these communities, it created a new virtual education business.

The main objective of this chapter is to propose an alternative framework to analyze Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – which we call a “non-strategic” approach to CSR– that stems from a criticism of the normative perspective of Public Relations (PR) and the competitive corporate strategic mindset. Inspired by Certeau’s tactical take on the everyday life of common people and the Latin American critical school of “alternative communication,” we set the foundations of a theoretical and practical overture that could lead to a set of possibilities in the area of CSR. The conceptualization of this alternative view about CSR is based on both a critical discussion of fundamental notions of PR, communication and management, and the empirical insights stemming from the practice in the field, mainly in the Latin American region. The non-strategic approach to CSR challenges both theoretically and practically the very idea of socially accountable corporation and its relation with society. Conceptually, the non-strategic approach considers all the parties engaged in the process are responsible for bringing out emerging value and translating it into a shared destination through experimentation. Practically, being non-strategic, which emphasizes the tactical actions that are rooted in the daily life of people, entails the creation of social innovation spaces or labs and networking that could become tools for problem solving and increase the possibilities for creative collaboration between corporations and communities. The non-strategic approach offers an analytical framework to assess the ethical and practical implications of CSR initiatives.