1. Applying knowledge management concepts to the supply chain: How a Danish firm achieved a remarkable breakthrough in Japan
- Author
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Nigel Holden and Martin Glisby
- Subjects
Marketing ,Strategic planning ,Process (engineering) ,Strategy and Management ,Supply chain ,media_common.quotation_subject ,language.human_language ,Management ,Knowledge sharing ,Danish ,Intermediary ,Negotiation ,Market economy ,Applying knowledge ,language ,Business ,Business and International Management ,media_common - Abstract
Executive Overview For more than two decades Japan has ranked as a market of unusual complexity. Japan's distribution system permanently baffles; negotiation is as if with alien beings; its long-term approach to business disconcerts; choosing market intermediaries is an art in itself, while securing a business foothold and market presence entails massive costs. Prescriptions for how to do business with Japan are largely the same that dominated Western thinking in the 1980s, as if Japan has not moved on. If our company had applied the conventional thinking, our strategy for entering the Japanese market would have floundered. But we refused to follow the standard wisdom. We proceeded on the assumption that our best chance lay in a novel approach: we would co-create the market with our Japanese business partners through a synergistic process of knowledge sharing. In its planning and implementation our strategy turned on its head much accepted marketing wisdom. Perhaps most strikingly we learned that it is po...
- Published
- 2005