IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-23691-2_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Honda: Serendipity or Strategy from 1997–2007?

In: The Second Automobile Revolution

Author

Listed:
  • Denise J. Luethge
  • Philippe Byosière

Abstract

Serendipity or strategy? What Las Vegas bookie could have set the odds that one day in Detroit, the ‘motor city’, a robot called Asimo, developed by Japanese automobile giant Honda, would conduct the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to ‘The Impossible Dream’ from the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha? Yet, such an event took place on 15 May 2008 in order to stimulate interest in mathematics and science among America’s youth. It is a sign of the changing times that with Takeo Fukui at the helm, Honda is back on the track of its innovative, creative and risk-taking roots that exemplified the life of its founder, Soichiro Honda. But not all is rosy at Honda: February 2008 saw the announcement of the closing of its motorcycle plant, opened in 1973 in Marysville, Ohio, despite having a US market share of 25 per cent. Honda also announced the closing of its motorcycle plant in Hamamatsu in order to consolidate heavy motorcycle production under one roof in Kyushu. However, on the other hand, in February 2007 Honda decided to open its aircraft headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, close to the site where the Wright brothers pioneered at Kitty Hawk, to manufacture the Hondajet targeted at an increasingly wealthy customer base in North America and Europe. These two major strategic decisions are strong indications that current CEO and Honda visionary Takeo Fukui is taking the company back to what founder Soichiro Honda envisioned as a global technological innovator pursuing new frontiers.

Suggested Citation

  • Denise J. Luethge & Philippe Byosière, 2009. "Honda: Serendipity or Strategy from 1997–2007?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Michel Freyssenet (ed.), The Second Automobile Revolution, chapter 6, pages 112-128, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-23691-2_6
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230236912_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-23691-2_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.