Hirotaka Takeuchi

is a professor of management practice in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. He co-authored The New New Product Development Game which influenced the development of the Scrum framework.

Biography

Takeuchi was born in 1946

Takeuchi has written or co-authored numerous articles for the Harvard Business Review. He has served on the planning board of the World Economic Forum and is an external director at Mitsui & Co.

The New New Product Development Game

Takeuchi collaborated on a number of articles with Ikujiro Nonaka (野中 郁次郎), a colleague at Hitotsubashi University, including the 1986 Harvard Business Review article The New New Product Development Game, in which they emphasized speed and flexibility for new product development.

The article looked at practices in a number of successful manufacturing companies such as Fuji-Xerox, Honda, 3M and Toyota. The authors drew attention to the practice in those companies of having an overlapping development process ('like Sashimi'), rather than the older sequential approach.

Autonomy - being self-organising and empowered to make decisions over how to do the work Cross-fertilization - having within the teams all the skills needed to complete the task Self-Transcendence - elevating their goals and pushing beyond the normally accepted limit; challenging the status quo

The article attracted attention when it was published an agile software development technique now used across the globe.

The Nonaka-Takeuchi model of knowledge creation and practice

Takeuchi's colleague Ikujiro Nonaka wrote an article The Knowledge-Creating Company in the Harvard Business Review, 1991. It explored two types of knowledge, namely tacit knowledge which is that learned by experience and communicated indirectly, and explicit knowledge, which is that recorded in documentation, manuals and procedures. Nonaka wrote that Japanese companies viewed knowledge as primarily tacit but had mastered converting tacit to explicit and back again (the 'spiral of knowledge'). The Knowledge-Creating Company : How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. The authors described the methods used in successful Japanese companies to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products. They called this 'organizational knowledge creation' – an ability to 'create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the organization and embody it in products, services and systems'.

The book published by Oxford University Press was named as Best Book of the Year in Business and Management, 1996 by the Association of American Publishers.

Selected bibliography