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Why are some companies better at innovation
than others?
Drawing on the candid reflections of managers
at leading technology-based companies such as Hewlett-Packard,
Chaparral Steel, Microsoft, and Motorola, Wellsprings
of Knowledge shows that the successful innovators are
companies that build and manage knowledge effectively. The
book reveals lessons for creating, nurturing, and growing
the experience and accumulated knowledge of the organization
into renewable assets and competitive advantage.
Leonard-Barton illustrates the dimensions
of the core capabilities along which all organizations must
innovate: skills and knowledge base, physical systems, managerial
systems, and values and norms of behavior. However, these
capabilities can function as "core rigidities"
if not constantly assessed. Managers must design capabilities
as evolving, organic reservoirs.
Using examples of both successes and failures
in new product development -- and introducing new concepts
such as creative abrasion, empathic design, and failing
forward -- Wellsprings of Knowledge reveals the
key knowledge-building activities that managers need to
guide, control, and inspire:
- developing shared problem-solving skills
- experimenting
- integrating information across functional
and project boundaries
- importing expertise from outside the
firm
Wellsprings of Knowledge will help
managers understand the long-term, systemic, and people-based
nature of technological advantage and inspire them to think
constantly about the potential knowledge-building import
of every technology-related decision they make.
Dorothy Leonard-Barton is the William
J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration at the
Harvard Business School.
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