Abstract
Enterprises must continuously pursue exploration and exploitation activities to enable them to adapt to rapidly changing business environments and generate sustainable profits. However, strategies that balance exploration and exploitation in engineering design have yet to be established. Previously, we developed methods to quantitatively evaluate the degree of exploration and exploitation in design by focusing on qualitative and quantitative changes in product functions and attributes, respectively; however, these methods do not support new product design. This paper presents a method that offers directions for new product design based on information from past products and large-scale external information resources. The proposed method involves extracting function phrases and attribute values from documents, product cluster analysis based on function and attribute distances, and analysis of semantic similarity of functions and chronological trends of attributes. Furthermore, the proposed method was applied to the design of a vacuum cleaner to confirm its effectiveness. Some of the suggestions included functions that lead to design exploration, while others were not effective because of the properties of the external information resources used and natural language processing. Some suggested directions for exploitation were consistent with recent trends in vacuum cleaners, indicating the effectiveness of the method; however, further validation in actual design problems is essential.
