Abstract
Recently, in the field of business administration, the idea that ambidexterity of exploration and exploitation is necessary for organizations to continue to generate value in a sustainable manner has been attracting attention. Although the balance between exploration and exploitation is also considered to be important in engineering research and development and design, research from such a perspective has not been conducted. We have been analyzing the ambidexterity of exploration and exploitation from the perspective of design, and developing a method to evaluate the degree of ambidexterity objectively and quantitatively. In this paper, the definitions of exploration and exploitation in design, a quantitative evaluation method for the degree of exploration based on the definitions, and the results of the verification of this method are presented. The evaluation method is developed on the basis of the definition that focuses on whether the design object has changed qualitatively or quantitatively as a result of the organization’s activity. In this method, words related to the functions of the target product are extracted from the design documents, and their similarity to those in past documents is evaluated. As a result of applying the proposed method to the descriptions of past products, for which the relationship between exploration and exploitation has been clarified, it is shown that the proposed method can be appropriate as an evaluation method for exploration.
