Yoko Nishihara

Innovation support system for creative product design based on chance discovery

Under a turbulently changing and highly competitive market, discovery of a chance is always significant for many companies to launch new and creative products or services in time, fulfilling consumers demands for occupying more market share. Many available methods on market research for designing new products are more focused on the analysis process, so that product designers run short of ideas discovery. In this paper, we present a novel innovation support system (ISS) based on chance discovery with data crystallization to assist human innovation in designing new products, especially creative products. The ISS is a human-centric system to enable value cognition and follows the following process: (1) visualized scenario graph generation, (2) human value cognition, (3) value co-creation based on shared knowledge, and (4) emerging chances evaluation. The result of a case study validates the effectiveness of ISS.

Event Extraction and Visualization for Obtaining Personal Experiences from Blogs

Internet users write blogs related to their personal experience, daily news, and so on. Though we can obtain blogs about personal experience using search engines on the Web, the search engines also output blogs about other topics unrelated to personal experiences. Therefore, we need to take too much time to read all blogs for obtaining those about personal experiences. This paper proposes a support system for obtaining blogs about personal experience efficiently. The system extracts three keywords that denote place, object , and action from a blog. The three keywords describe an event that leads a person to write a blog about personal experience. The system expresses the event with three pictures related to the extracted keywords. The pictures help users to judge whether personal experiences are written in the blog or not. We experimented with the system, and verified that it supports users to obtain personal experiences efficiently.

Communication Analysis Focusing on Negative Utterances in Combinatorial Thinking Games

Abstract.We have developed a table game named Innovators Market Game (IMG) that supports users in thinking up ideas by combining existing products. There are two kinds of players in the game, innovators and investors. While the innovators think up ideas and propose them, the investors criticize the ideas and make decisions as to whether or not they will invest their money in the ideas. In the game, the innovators not only propose ideas, but also improve on ideas that reflect utterances from investors that represent negative impressions. Although ideas that have much money invested in them might be related to negative utterances from investors, the relation has not been previously validated. We have analyzed the communications in the IMG and have found features of communication in which ideas were invested with much money. After a proposal of an idea by an innovator, investors give negative utterances to the innovator. The innovator accepts the negative utterances with positive utterances and improves their ideas. Finally, the investors satisfy the idea with positive utterances and invest highly in the idea.

Valuable Change Detection in Keyword Map Animation

This paper proposes a map animation interface that supports interpretations of difference between two keyword relationships with varying viewpoints. Finding keywords whose relationships drastically change is crucial because the value of keywords mainly consists inof their relationships in networks. Therefore, this interface outputs marks for keywords that drastically change in their relations when it shows animations between two relationships.

A System Method to Elicit Innovative Knowledge Based on Chance Discovery for Innovative Product Design

In the past few years, supplying value-added and innovative products has become an important business strategy. In this paper, a system method of innovative knowledge elicitation based on chance discovery for new product design is proposed and described. This system contains three functional modules: 1 scenario graph generation module by using Keygraph, a visual tool of chance discovery; 2 innovative knowledge solicitation module by innovators market game IMG, a kind of table game for collaborative innovation; and 3 innovative knowledge alternatives selection module based on the method of analytic hierarchy process AHP. The experiment is taken to play IMG and make value cognition by humans based on the scenario graph generated by Keygraph. During the IMG, innovative knowledge as new value is co-created by humans. AHP is used to evaluate these innovative alternatives. The performance of the method is illustrated by using a case study on innovative product design. The results indicate this method can aid humans in eliciting innovative knowledge for creative product design at the early stage of product development.

Innovators Marketplace as Game on the Table versus Board on the Web

The Innovators Market Game (IMG) has been proposed as a tool for aiding innovative thoughts and communication, coming after our 10-year experiences in chance discovery where tools of data visualization have been applied in cases of decision making of business teams. This game enabled to run and accelerate the process of innovation, as well as to train human’s talent of analogical and combinatorial thinking. In this paper, we compare the effects of IMG as table game and a Web based environment of communication where the fundamental features of IMG are imported. The effects of these two agorae, one on the table and the other on the Web, are compared. It is shown that there are some aspects of innovative communication we can enhance, some on the table and some on the Web. This directs us to future work merging the two in one process called Innovators Marketplace as a generalization of IMG.

Title-Composing Support System for Reaching New Audiences

This paper proposes a support system for composing good titles for research papers in order to reach new audiences. Our system takes titles as input. The system evaluates title understandability and interest level of a title. The system ranks titles and outputs a title list. Users are able to recompose their titles by referring to the list and each evaluation value. Using the system, users can obtain new audiences who have not previously been interested in the userpsilas research area. Experimental results showed that our system is able to rank titles in descending order of audiencespsila choices.

Niche of idea activations as source of social creativity: A finding from innovation game

By mining and looking at the relations between pieces of knowledge, the talent of human to create an idea from a combination of knowledge comes to be elevated. In this paper, the Innovation Game we have been presenting since last year is introduced as an environment for the communication to elevate this talent. The players called innovators present ideas created from combining prepared basic ideas, and sell the ideas to each other and their stocks to investors. As a result, the values of ideas are evaluated, to reveal latent opportunities in the market. Here we present experimental results showing the niche, i.e., the space between clusters of already used or newly invented ideas of business, tends to enable players to create ideas/products of which the quality can be highly evaluated by the human society.

Estimation of friendship and hierarchy from conversation records

We have developed a method for estimating the level of friendship between two people and the strength of their hierarchy. This information is important because building the relationships needed to create something new requires an understanding of current relationships. Using records of conversation among people, our method first identifies the sentence types and then uses the identified types to estimate the level of friendship and the strength of the hierarchy. Testing using records for various types of conversation demonstrated that this method can robustly estimate both values from one-person-fixed conversation records.

Continuation Support of Conversation by Recommending Next Topics Relating to a Present Topic

This paper proposes a conversation support system that recommends next topics relating to the present topic. The purpose of the proposed system is to support to continue conversation. The proposed system detects spoken words of two users, makes a log text of conversation. Then, the system extracts the present topic from the log text of conversation, and evaluates the relations between the present topic and next topic candidates. The system chooses next topics and recommends them to the users. The proposed system has an interface of Head Mounted Display (HMD) showing a log text of conversation, a word of the present topic, and words of the next topic. One of the users wearing the HMD can grasp what topic is talked, and choose a next topic from recommended them. The users can continue conversations by talking about recommended topics. Experimental results showed that the proposed system could support to continue conversations. We also found that the proposed system supported users to obtain equal chances to speak.