Toyota Knowledge Management

Toyota Motor Corporation is the largest automobile manufacturer in the world (Schmitt). The company’s success revolves around its high quality automobiles that are sold at competitive prices. In addition to quality and price, Toyota is well acknowledged for its knowledge sharing culture as a crucial reason for its success. In the article “The Toyota way of global knowledge creation the ‘learn local, act global’ strategy” we are introduced to several different approaches of knowledge management practices that Toyota has developed over the years. Through these practices they were able create and share knowledge for further growth and success internally, within the organization and externally, through subsidiaries and a joint venture partnership.

A joint venture is a great way to be able to not only share costs, but share the knowledge and expertise of both companies for one another’s competitive advantage. This case illustrates the expertise of Toyota’s production capabilities partnered with Peugeot’s European market knowledge to create a new automobile that both companies may benefit from. At TPCA, both companies were able to combine their knowledge of design and production, along with learning about one another’s corporate culture and technologies. Through mutual knowledge sharing, both the companies would prosper and once again, Toyota would be able to enrich its vision ‘learn local, act global’, by spreading the knowledge back its headquarters and subsidiaries once the project was complete (Ichijo and

With over 200,000 employees in 45 countries, developing a strong knowledge management system was extremely important for success of this company (Mundy). Infosys’ mission in regards to knowledge management is to “ensure that all organizational learning is leveraged in delivering business advantage to the customer,” (Rao) and “to make every instance of learning within Infosys available to every employee” (Garud and Kumaraswamy). In addition, to support their mission the company lives by a “Learn Once, Use Anywhere” (C. Kimble) model, which enabled the primary objective to reduce the effort of what has already been learned elsewhere. Thus, the company began to implement the structure of knowledge management extensively throughout their organization. Through the mission and objectives, one learns that the company developed a knowledge management program for the purpose of satisfying their customers efficiently along with saving learning time between the