Hirotaka Takeuchi facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Hirotaka Takeuchi
|
|
|---|---|
At the 2009 World Economic Forum, Davos
|
|
| Born | 16 October 1946 |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Alma mater | International Christian University University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | Influencing business practices worldwide |
Hirotaka Takeuchi (born in 1946) is a well-known professor at Harvard Business School. He teaches about how businesses are run. He also helped write an important article called The New New Product Development Game. This article later inspired the Scrum framework, a popular way to manage projects, especially in software.
Contents
About Hirotaka Takeuchi
Hirotaka Takeuchi was born in 1946. He studied at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Later, he earned more degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in the United States.
Before becoming a professor, he worked for big companies. He worked at McCann-Erickson, an advertising company, and at McKinsey & Company, a company that advises other businesses.
Teaching Career and Influence
Takeuchi started teaching at Harvard Business School in 1976. He then moved to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1983, becoming a full professor in 1987. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor for a short time.
In 1998, he helped start a new business school at Hitotsubashi University. He became its first dean. In 2010, he was named a Professor Emeritus there, which is an honor for retired professors. That same year, he also became a professor at Harvard Business School again.
Takeuchi has written many articles for the Harvard Business Review, a famous business magazine. He has also helped plan events for the World Economic Forum. This forum brings together leaders from around the world to discuss important issues. He also serves on the boards of large companies like Mitsui & Co.
The New New Product Development Game
Hirotaka Takeuchi worked with his colleague, Ikujiro Nonaka, on several articles. One very important article was The New New Product Development Game, published in 1986. In this article, they talked about how companies could develop new products faster and more flexibly.
Learning from Successful Companies
The article looked at how successful manufacturing companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, 3M, and Toyota developed products. They found that these companies did not use the old, step-by-step approach. Instead, they used an "overlapping" process. This was like Sashimi, where different parts of the process happen at the same time.
They compared this new way to the game of Rugby. In rugby, a team works together as a unit, passing the ball back and forth to move forward. This means teams can use different strategies to make the most of everyone's skills.
Key Ideas for Teamwork
Takeuchi and Nonaka found that the best teams shared three important qualities:
- Autonomy: Teams were self-organizing. This means they could make their own decisions about how to do their work.
- Cross-fertilization: Teams had all the different skills they needed within the team itself. This helped them complete tasks without waiting for others.
- Self-Transcendence: Teams aimed high and pushed beyond what was normally expected. They liked to challenge old ways of doing things.
Impact on Software Development
This article became very important for software development. Seven years after it was published, a team led by Jeff Sutherland found the article. They realized its ideas could help them deliver software projects on time and within budget.
Sutherland then worked with Ken Schwaber to create the Scrum framework. Scrum is a popular way to manage projects, especially in software. It uses many of the ideas from Takeuchi and Nonaka's article. Today, Scrum is used by teams all over the world.
The Nonaka-Takeuchi Model of Knowledge Creation
Takeuchi's colleague, Ikujiro Nonaka, wrote about "The Knowledge-Creating Company" in 1991. This article explored two types of knowledge:
- Tacit knowledge: This is knowledge you gain from experience. It's hard to write down, like knowing how to ride a bike.
- Explicit knowledge: This is knowledge that is written down. It can be found in manuals, documents, or procedures.
Nonaka explained that Japanese companies were good at turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and back again. They called this the "spiral of knowledge."
In 1995, Nonaka and Takeuchi wrote a book together called The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. This book explained their ideas to a wider audience. They described how successful Japanese companies created new knowledge. They then used this knowledge to make successful products. They called this "organizational knowledge creation." It's the ability to create new ideas, share them, and use them to make products, services, and systems.
The Association of American Publishers named their book the Best Book of the Year in Business and Management in 1996.
See also
In Spanish: Hirotaka Takeuchi para niños
- SECI model of knowledge dimensions
