Abstract
It is critical for companies and other organizations to balance exploration and exploitation so that they can adapt to rapid changes in the business environment and develop and design products in a sustainable manner. However, no methodology has been established to balance them. This paper proposes a method to support the directional determination of exploration and exploitation in the product design and development. This method identifies functions and attributes that can be explored and exploited in new product design and development, based on past product information and large-scale external information resources. The functions and attributes are presented to designers to direct their exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the proposed method was validated by applying it to the design of a camera. The results showed that the proposal for exploration directions included functions that lead to designers' ideas, indicating the potential effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, the proposed exploitation direction includes known trends in attribute value changes, indicating the method is feasible.
