How did Japanese companies become pioneers internationally in the automotive and microelectronics industries? What explains their success? The two most well-known Japanese professors of Business Management, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, professors at Hitotsubashi University, argue that the key to understanding the success of large Japanese enterprises lies in the way they manage the knowledge of their members.

This ability allows them to innovate and continuously develop new products and technologies. [...] Nonaka and Takeuchi, in a straightforward, theoretically rich, and simultaneously practical manner, explain how knowledge management is conducted in successful Japanese companies such as Honda, Canon, Nissan, Matsushita, and others.

The authors contend that in the knowledge society, in order to remain competitive, a business must transform into a knowledge-based enterprise, and they propose ways in which this can happen.