Hitotsubashi ICS Professor Ken Kusunoki specializes in strategy and innovation. He currently teaches Organizational Capability and Business Architecture at ICS and oversees Field Studies and Knowledge Week. Starting in the Fall of 2010, he will also teach the popular Corporate Strategy course.
In the past, Professor Kusunoki’s research has appeared in various books in both Japanese and English. This year, he is involved in the publication of two books. The first,Competitive Strategy as a Narrative Story（ストーリーとしての競争戦略：優れた戦略の条件）（Toyo Keizai, 2010）is in Japanese, and at the time of this post, is a best-seller and enjoying a 5-star rating on Amazon Japan. The book provides a rich and deep understanding of what competitive strategy is from a unique perspective that attributes the essence of strategy to narrative consistency. The book expounds on the conditions of superior competitive strategies in internationally known brands such as Starbucks, Dell, and Amazon, as well as in Japanese companies such as Recruit, Rakuten, Askul, and Gulliver International.
Professor Kusunoki is the co-author of a second publication in English, Dynamics of Knowledge, Corporate Systems and Innovation (Springer, 2010). This book is written on the basis that knowledge is created and accumulated in the corporate system, which seeks to utilize it to introduce innovation to the market and society. Simultaneously, corporations generate new knowledge through their in-house R&D activities and introduce new products and services to the market by combining their own new knowledge and the knowledge generated by others, for example in universities. Thus, the corporate system is the essential linchpin between knowledge and innovation, and the interactive dynamics between knowledge, the corporate system, and innovation are extremely important. The book seeks to explain these dynamics to help readers to understand and even guide innovative activities in the society.
