The purpose of this research is to prove that analogizing difficult experiences is useful for solving quite another problem. Difficult experiences are defined a group of vivid constraints that is made by trial and error. This research analyzes the effect of analogizing difficult experiences, and proposes a creativity support system using the knowledge.

The framework supports us to understand structure of things. This paper presents a method to develop a new product or service by reframing the framework, as a trigger of business deployment, by introducing a developed Web based gaming tool called "Koto Factory". It stimulates players to be aware of new products or services in combining elements of two different existing products or services decomposed by the framework consisting of three factors that are purpose, function and material. The finding is that players have generated story-telling with new product or service transformed into a new framework that structures in a new way, i.e., purpose becomes function of new things, materials are synthesized as part of new things, function is reinforced by additional function etc. This implies reframing is one of the clue to design new product or service development.

The Tsugo roulette (TR) has been invented for externalizing tsugoes, i.e., the latent dynamics of prior constraints restricting/urging actions and posterior constraints emerging from actions that are linked to latent intentions. This "roulette" has blanks corresponding to balanced score card (BSC) which are connected via arrows corresponding to elements of tsugos, i.e., the intentions and constraints. By filling and circulating tsugo-roulette sheets, the blanks are filled to check and improve the feasibility of proposed actions and its consistency with others' proposals. As a result of applying TR to workshops on businesses including service industries and power plant management, we found concrete actions and participants' interest in their social relation to external environments, come to be externalized.

We have developed an XML schema of manufacturing case data and visualizing methods of manufacturing knowledge. The manufacturing case data is composed of material specifications, processing conditions, machine specifications and evaluation results, which are basically represented in text to share and to compare the associated knowledge. The data is including multimedia data partly, but it is difficult to handle directly the visual data in XML for the purpose. In the paper, we proposed an image search method and examined its possibility through the experiments on the appearance images of laser cutting surface and beads of arc welding.

In this study, we constructed a brand-discrimination test which consisted of twenty-eight items. This test is designed to measure levels of a trait that participants can discriminate a product of a particular brand from among products of others. We chose MUJI, which is a well-known retail brand across the world, as the brand. There were four steps to construct the test. First, one hundred and one items which have four choices were developed and a survey with three hundred and seven participants who at least know MUJI was conducted in order to examine effectiveness of the items. Next, seventy-three items were excluded after item analysis and verifications of unidimensionality. And then, item response theory analyses were performed to the remaining the twenty-eight items and their parameters of slope(discrimination) and location(difficulty) were calculated. Finally, test information curve and test characteristic curve for the test were estimated in order to confirm characteristics of the test.

An approach of extracting the tacit knowledge during the curved shell plates' manufacturing process using the accuracy evaluation system is discussed. First, to extract the plate from the point cloud obtained from laser scanner which includes needless points automatically, a new extraction algorithm which is more efficient is proposed. Also, the flow of the measurement is totally automated by an automation engine for ease of use by the workers. On the basis of efficient data measurement, by virtualizing the templates of plates, the knowledge during the plates' manufacturing process can be finally extracted and rearranged into the system to propose proper heating factors.