How did Japanese companies become international leaders in the automotive and microelectronics industries? What explains their success? The two most renowned Japanese professors of Business Administration, Ikuziro 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 continually develop new products and technologies. In the age of the Internet, the explosion of information and communication, and the emergence of innovation as an essential competitive advantage, companies increasingly realize that their most important asset is intellectual capital - the knowledge of their members and their ability to develop and apply it.

Nonaka and Takeuchi clearly and theoretically explain, in a practical manner, how knowledge management is carried out in successful Japanese companies such as Honda, Canon, Nissan, Matsushita, and others. The authors argue that in the knowledge society, for a company to be competitive, it must become a knowledge-driven enterprise, and they propose ways in which this can be achieved.