Takeshi Takenaka

An analysis of service studies toward sustainable value creation

It is difficult to establish a new scientific methodology for studies of service because the value of a service should become apparent through societal interaction and created value is needed to be sustainable in society and environment. This paper provides an overview of previous studies of services using an academic database to clarify the underlying problems related to this subject. It introduces our study example on lifestyle including daily behaviour, personality, and attitudes about information technologies. Finally, a new classification of service models is introduced, considering the relationships among service providers, service receivers, and service environments.

Electrophysiological measurement of interest during walking in a simulated environment

A reliable neuroscientific technique for objectively estimating the degree of interest in a real environment is currently required in the research fields of neuroergonomics and neuroeconomics. Toward the development of such a technique, the present study explored electrophysiological measures that reflect an observers interest in a nearly-real visual environment. Participants were asked to walk through a simulated shopping mall and the attractiveness of the shopping mall was manipulated by opening and closing the shutters of stores. During the walking task, participants were exposed to task-irrelevant auditory probes (two-stimulus oddball sequence). The results showed a smaller P2/early P3a component of task-irrelevant auditory event-related potentials and a larger lambda response of eye-fixation-related potentials in an interesting environment (i.e., open-shutter condition) than in a boring environment (i.e., closed-shutter condition); these findings can be reasonably explained by supposing that participants allocated more attentional resources to visual information in an interesting environment than in a boring environment, and thus residual attentional resources that could be allocated to task-irrelevant auditory probes were reduced. The P2/early P3a component and the lambda response may be useful measures of interest in a real visual environment.

Business Constraints in Reuse Services

Global product sales are increasing rapidly. As many as 70 million automobiles are produced annually worldwide. The number of refrigerators, PCs, and cellular phones sold annually are 80 million, 230 million, and 1.1 billion, respectively. Manufacturing these products require a large amount of energy and material resources. Therefore, to achieve an environmentally sustainable society, it is necessary to reduce energy consumption and materials use in manufacturing by prolonging the use of products, and by encouraging the reuse of their parts. Businesses that develop closed-loop supply chains of products, or that support the promotion of product reuse, parts reuse, product remanufacturing, and effective material recycling, minimize CO2 problems, energy and material resource problems, and hazardous waste problems, thereby playing significant roles in achieving environmentally sustainable industries. Using interviews, companies that run reuse businesses were surveyed for this study. We focus on the reuse business in four product areas: cars, auto parts, PCs, and ink cartridges. The survey involved interviews of managers from eight companies. We also conducted a consumer survey via questionaires to investigateconsumer recognition and impressions of reused products. Here we present the results of those surveys.

Real-Time Process Management System in a Restaurant by Sharing Food Order Information

In a full-service restaurant, it is crucial to share order information among staff in the dining room and kitchen. This paper introduces a real-time process management system for restaurants using an advanced point-of-sale (POS) system by which staff can share order information in real time. In this system, kitchen staff can check all customer orders by the dish that was ordered and the elapsed time of each order. Moreover, dining hall workers can grasp their customer situation with a monitor. By introducing this system to a restaurant, we confirmed that it can make preparation processes more efficient and reduce customers’ claims.

Temporal co-creation between self and others with multi-sensory inputs

This study uses cognitive psychological experiments to elucidate human temporal co-creation with environments or other people. Time series analyses of alternate tapping with constantly paced computer signals (Experiment 1) show some modality-specific features when the participants receive signals through visual or auditory means. Subliminally perturbed signals using sine-wave function (Experimental 2) were revealed as having effects on the participants’ tapping performance especially in visual perturbation. Results from interpersonal tapping tasks (Experiment 3) reveal the emergence of temporal co-creation, including entrainment and mutually complementary relationships depending on the sense modality. These findings can be the underlying basis of the design for natural temporal communication between human and artifacts. � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Improving Customer’s Subjective Waiting Time Introducing Digital Signage

In the 1970s, the Japanese restaurant industry introduced the chain store system, which was later introduced into the retail industry in the USA to enhance productivity [1] [2]. The chain store system was designed to realize “low-cost operations”. For instance, chain store restaurants simplify and automate service operations to reduce the number of service staff. Moreover, they standardize service operations by introducing service manuals for use in training part-time staff. Prices of dining decreased throughout chain store systems, and Japanese consumers came to enjoy restaurants casually. Consequently, the market scale of the Japanese restaurant industry expanded from 8 trillion yen to 250 trillion yen during the 1970s to 1990s. Restaurants in Japan numbered approximately 737,000 in 2006 [3].

Multi-Agent Market Modeling Based on Analysis of Consumer Lifestyles

This paper describes the multi-agent modeling of a service market which consists of a service provider and various types of consumers. The difficulty in determining, and thus reacting to, the needs of markets, lies in the fact that consumers have diverse value concepts, which can differ through interaction with others. This study conducts a questionnaire on consumer lifestyles, and constructs models for the several types of consumers, based on the survey results. It also clarifies characteristics of a service market. The multi-agent simulations of this service market are executed to verify the validity of the proposed model.

A Service Demand Forecasting Method using a Customer Classification Model

This paper proposes a service demand forecasting method that uses a customer classification model to consider various customer behaviors. A decision support system is introduced that helps managers and employees in retail or restaurant stores. In addition, this paper proposes a process of development and launch, based on observation and implementation in real situations.

An acceptance model of recommender systems based on a large-scale internet survey

Recommendation services capture and exploit personal information such as demographic attributes, preferences, and user behaviors on the internet. It is known that some users feel uneasiness regarding such information acquisition by systems and have concern over their online privacy. Investigating the structure of the uneasiness and evaluating the effect to user acceptance of the recommender systems is an important issue to develop user-accepting services. In this study, we developed an acceptance model of recommender systems based on a large-scale internet survey using 60 kinds of pseudo-services.

Smart appliance network as cyber physical systems: Creating value to meet various consumer lifestyles

This paper discusses the possibility of a smart appliance network to enhance values for users with various lifestyles. It introduces an example of data analysis whereby lifestyle survey data from 3,000 participants is integrated with actual log data from their smart appliances. Results indicate a possibility to enhance value for each appliance user considering five lifestyle factors. Finally it illustrates how a smart appliance network could create a new eco-system among manufacturing, services and consumers as a Cyber Physical Systems.