Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

The Japanese Know-Who Based Model of
Innovation Management – Reducing Risk at High
Speed
Sigvald J. Harryson
From Time-Based Competition to Time-Based Innovation
Introduction
Global competition and risk in innovation call for unique approaches and processes
to win on time with outstanding projects. Time-based competition in innovation
received particular attention in Japan in the 1980s and the early 90s
(Abegglen and Stalk 1985; Harryson 1998; Stalk and Hout 1990). This is also
where our research started with more than 150 interviews conducted during the
mid-90s and follow-up interviews in early 2000 to explore and better understand
how Canon, Sony and Toyota manage to reduce time in their innovation processes.
The interviews were conducted across all functions performing and supervising
innovation, including some top executives, such as Akio Morita in June
1993, who strongly inspired the development of the know-who based concept
through the following statement:
The driving force of our rapid innovation is the conviction that if we lose money we
can always recover, but if we lose time we can’t. Therefore, time has always been a
critical issue at Sony. The best way to gain time is to communicate a lot and establish
as many personal relationships as possible… The more people you know, the better
it is.
Whereas know-how is the ability to solve problems efficiently based primarily
on internally accumulated knowledge, experience, and skills, know-who is the
ability to acquire, transform, and apply that know-how through personal relationships.
The ‘who’ in know-who based companies knows who has the know-how,
has the active empathy to rapidly establish the trustful relationship required to acquire
that know-how, and has the multiple competencies required to transform and
apply it in a new context so that innovation can occur. Increasingly, it seems that
to know who has the know-how gives new opportunities for corporate entrepreneurship
and disruptive innovation through proactive exploration and creation of
new knowledge and invention, while simultaneously using know-who to transform
the results into target-driven and resource-efficient R&D processes for global exploitation
of innovation.