The Case of Honda: A Dialectical yet Coherent Firm

Abstract

This conceptual paper proposes that Honda's innovative prowess of producing both radical and disruptive innovations within their aerospace and automotive/pick-up truck development activities can be traced back to its organizational culture of continually embracing opposites or contradiction across dialectical synthesis. It is this synthesis of various 'contradictions' or viewpoints that gives the firm and its resulting disruptive innovations the simultaneous characteristic of continuity and novelty. Such a pattern was discerned across second hand data related to the development of the HondaJet and Ridgeline; and appears to confirm both Nonaka and Toyama's thesis of the dialectical firm, as well as Christensen's thesis of the feasibility of producing distinctive innovations at relatively low costs. Key organizational enablers towards attaining such an organizational reality requires management focus on nurturing mutual trust, care, empathy, redundancy of information and requisite variety.