From Management Research to Practice in the Age of AIWhy We Published the 22-Book AI Management Library

Naoki Kadowaki
Aug 10
8 min read

AI Has Transformed Our Ability to Find Answers

AI has dramatically lowered the barriers to acquiring knowledge and conducting analysis. Information and insights that once required specialist expertise, considerable time, and significant expense are now accessible to many people within minutes. Writing, organizing data, developing hypotheses, and comparing alternatives are no longer tasks performed by people alone. AI has become part of everyday knowledge work.

For companies, this represents an extraordinary opportunity. Individuals and small organizations can now use capabilities that were once available mainly to large enterprises. They can make decisions more quickly, test new business ideas, and communicate with audiences around the world. AI is narrowing some of the gaps that have historically resulted from differences in company size and resources.

Yet the more widely knowledge and analytical capability become available, the less likely they are to provide a lasting competitive advantage on their own. Having information, analyzing it accurately, and solving a given problem efficiently will remain important. But these capabilities alone will no longer determine a company’s future. In an age when AI can generate many possible answers, the questions a company chooses to ask—and the future it chooses to pursue—will increasingly define what makes it different.

AI Alone Cannot Decide the Future a Company Should Pursue

AI can draw upon enormous amounts of past and present information to show us what may be possible. But it should not decide, by itself, which future a company ought to pursue or what value the company should create, and for whom. Those questions involve a company’s history, its responsibilities to society, human aspirations, and the intentions of its leaders.

If efficiency were the only objective, management might simply execute the most rational options presented by AI. In reality, however, management involves choices that cannot be compared through numbers alone. Should a company prioritize near-term profit or invest for future growth? Should it protect an established business or enter a new market? When transformation will create disadvantages for some stakeholders, through what process and dialogue should it proceed? Decisions such as these carry values, consequences, and responsibility.

This is why I believe leaders in the age of AI must be able to envision the future, define Purpose, and create enterprise value by combining human and artificial intelligence. The evolution of AI does not eliminate the role of management. On the contrary, the responsibility to clarify why a company exists and guide the organization toward that purpose becomes even more important.

The leader of the future does not need to hold every answer personally. The essential role of leadership is to define the questions the company must address, connect the diverse intelligence of people and AI, choose a direction, and accept responsibility for the outcome. Rather than viewing AI only as a substitute for human labor, we should use human–AI collaboration to create value that neither could achieve alone. This is where I see the possibility of a new form of management.

Two Core Ideas: Future Value and Enterprise Redefinition

This perspective led us to develop and research two closely connected ideas: Future Value Theory and Enterprise Redefinition.

Future value is not simply a forecast of future revenue or profit. It is a way of considering the future a company seeks to create and the capabilities it is building to realize that future—including technology, people, customer relationships, capital, and trust from society. It looks beyond the present value visible in financial statements and focuses on a company’s still-emerging capacity to create the future.

Enterprise Redefinition is the continuous process through which a company redefines itself as its environment changes. It is more than improving a product or service, and more than rewriting a corporate philosophy. It connects Purpose, business, organization, capital, and leadership, and continually updates the answer to a fundamental question: Who are we, and what value do we exist to provide?

AI is forcing many companies to confront this need for redefinition. Knowledge, operating processes, workforce scale, and information asymmetry—advantages on which many companies were built—may not retain the same value in the future. At the same time, long-established assets such as trust, customer understanding, frontline knowledge, technology, brand, and relationships with society can become new sources of value when combined with AI. The task is not to reject the past. It is to determine what should be preserved, what should change, and what must be created anew.

Why We Created a 22-Book, 100-Chapter Library

We have now published the AI Management Library as 22 books across Japanese and English. Its core series comprises ten volumes and 100 chapters. The Library is grounded in three Working Papers—Future Value Theory, Enterprise Redefinition, and Enterprise Redefinition Observed—and contains approximately one million Japanese characters and their English-language editions.

Why build a body of work on this scale? Because management in the age of AI cannot be understood through a single theme. Considering only how to implement AI rarely moves a company beyond efficiency if its purpose and business remain unchanged. Pursuing new businesses will not produce lasting transformation if the organization, talent system, evaluation model, capital allocation, and leadership remain rooted in the past. And any meaningful discussion of enterprise value must consider not only current financial performance, but also investment in the future and a company’s relationship with society.

We therefore connected management, organization and people, future value, Enterprise Redefinition, enterprise valuation, capital strategy, and studies of global companies into a single body of knowledge. The Library invites readers to consider how management changes as AI advances; how people and AI can work together; what will create enterprise value in the future; how a company should rethink its purpose, business, organization, and leadership; and what can be learned from companies that have transformed markets and created industries.

The Library is not intended to impose a single answer. Every company has its own history, strengths, culture, customers, and role in society. The objective is not to copy successful global companies, but to discover the questions that truly matter for one’s own enterprise. We hope this framework can become a shared language through which business leaders and practitioners examine the future of their organizations.

Publishing Is an Entry Point to Investment and Management Practice

Our core business is investing in companies, participating actively in management, and putting Enterprise Redefinition into practice. We conducted this research, presented our theories through Working Papers, and published and organized them as the AI Management Library for a reason that goes well beyond delivering books.

We want to connect with business leaders, investors, and partners who share our commitment to future value creation and Enterprise Redefinition. With people who hold the same ambition, we want to create the future value of companies together and advance these ideas through real practice. The books are an entry point into our thinking and a common foundation from which dialogue can begin.

Investment should not end with the provision of capital. Active participation in management should not mean offering advice from outside the company. We want to work inside companies, alongside their leaders and employees, to uncover their distinctive potential. By reconnecting Purpose, business, organization, technology, and capital, we aim to turn that potential into future value that only that company can create.

Without research, practice can remain dependent on isolated experience and intuition. Without practice, theory can drift away from reality. Our aim is therefore to sustain a cycle: from research to theory, from theory to publishing, from publishing to investment and management participation, and from lessons learned in the field back into research. This cycle is central to what makes VURA Capital Innovation distinctive—and to what we aspire to become.

The 22 Books Are a Starting Point for Dialogue, Not a Finished System

These 22 books are not a finished system. AI will continue to evolve, and the environment surrounding companies will continue to change. Assumptions about management that appear sound today may be transformed within only a few years. Management knowledge therefore cannot remain fixed. It must continue to evolve through research and practice.

Publishing our work does not mean declaring it complete. It means opening our thinking to society and exposing it to different perspectives and criticism. Dialogue with readers, business leaders, researchers, investors, and practitioners will generate new questions. Application in real companies will reveal conditions we overlooked and cases in which theory does not work as expected. By bringing these lessons back into the next round of research and practice, we can strengthen and continuously update the entire system.

We want the AI Management Library to be a living library—one that leads to action by people and companies, rather than remaining untouched on a bookshelf. A reader may reconsider the Purpose of their company, redesign the roles of people and AI, begin investing in the future, or redefine an established business or organization. Each small step can become the beginning of new enterprise value creation.

Sharing New Management Knowledge—and Real Practice—from Japan to the World

We published the books in English as well as Japanese because these questions are not unique to Japanese companies. As AI transforms business and society, leaders around the world are confronting the same fundamental issues: Why does a company exist? How should people and AI work together? How should future enterprise value be assessed, and where should capital be allocated?

Japanese companies possess many strengths worth sharing with the world: a long-term perspective, respect for frontline work, commitment to quality, and enduring relationships with business partners and society. At the same time, many must reconsider established success models and organizational assumptions in order to move toward new forms of value. Redefining companies for the age of AI while preserving Japan’s distinctive strengths can itself become a valuable source of management knowledge for the world.

Our ambition is not only to present new theories from Japan, but also to demonstrate them through tangible value creation in real companies. We intend to go beyond words—to the point where companies change, people are able to contribute at their best, and new value reaches customers and society. That is what we mean by moving from research to practice.

Through this Library, we hope to meet people who share our perspective. Together with business leaders, investors, and partners who share the same ambition, we will create the future value of companies and bring new management knowledge—and the practice of enterprise value creation—from Japan to the world.