Hirotaka Takeuchi
Professor
Harvard Business School
Born: October 16, 1946
Professor Takeuchi received his B.A. from International Christian University in Tokyo and M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
He was an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School from 1976 to 1983, where he taught courses in marketing and retailing in the MBA program. He joined Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo as an Associate Professor in 1983 and became Professor in 1987. He returned to the Harvard Business School as a Visiting Professor in 1989 and 1990, where he taught “Competition and Strategy.” He returned to Hitotsubashi University in 1990. In 1998, he became Dean at Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy (ICS) and led to start the first state-run business school in Japan. After retiring from ICS in 2010, he joined Harvard Business School as a Professor.
Professor Takeuchi’s current research interests are focused on (a) the role of marketing within a firm’s global strategy, (b) the unique features of the Japanese new product development process, (c) the competitiveness of Japanese firms in global industries, and (d) the knowledge creation process within organizations.
He is the author of The Best Practice Revolution (Diamond-sha, 1994, in Japanese) and the co-author of the following books: (1) Corporate Self-Innovation: Managing Chaos and Creation (Takeuchi et al., Chuo Koron-sha, 1986, in Japanese);（2）Managing Heterogeneity: The Path to Global Management (Takeuchi and Yoko Ishikura, Diamond-sha, 1994, in Japanese); (3) The Knowledge Creating Company (Ikujiro Nonaka and Takeuchi, Oxford University Press, 1995), which won the 1995 “Best New Book of the Year” Award for the Business and Management category by the Association of American Publishers; (4) Can Japan Compete? (M. Porter, H. Takeuchi, and M. Sakakibara, 2000, London: McMillan in English, and Diamond-sha in Japanese), and (5) Hitotsubashi on Knowledge Management (I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi, John Wiley & Sons, 2004), and (6) Extreme Toyota (H. Takeuchi and N. Shimizu and E. Osono, John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
In addition, he has written over 30 articles for the Harvard Business Review, California Management Journal, Journal of Retailing, Japan Marketing Journal, Business Review, and other academic journals, and nearly 70 articles for business magazines.
His business experience includes management consulting work with McKinsey & Company in Tokyo and marketing research and account service work with McCann-Erikson in Tokyo and San Francisco. He is consultant to a number of multinationals and has been a frequent speaker at management conferences and seminars around the world.
He is a member of a number of committees formed by government agencies and political organizations in Japan. In addition, he is a member of the planning board of the World Economic Forum.
