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Okamoto, Masahiro; Murakami, Tamotsu

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Abstract:

It is important for organizations to balance exploration and exploitation in order to respond quickly and sustainably to the needs of society and users in a rapidly changing business environment. However, there is insufficient research on design methods to balance exploration and exploitation in product design, and a method to objectively identify the product groups to be balanced has not yet been established. In this paper, on the basis of the characteristics of exploration and exploitation in design, a cluster analysis using functional and attribute distances between products is proposed. To validate the proposed method, it was applied to past product cases in which the relationship between exploration and exploitation was known. The results showed that in the cases of cameras, in addition to known product groups forming large clusters, reasonable minor classifications that had not been identified were also obtained. This indicates that the proposed method is capable of analyzing reasonable clusters in the cases and is potentially effective in identifying product groups taking into consideration the relationship between exploration and exploitation.

Keywords:

Exploration and exploitation, Design methods, New product development, Innovation, Semantic data processing