TAKAHASHI, Shingo

ISSN：04534662

ISSN：09161600

Outline：Recent researches point out that companies could get competitive advantage if they focus on lead users(LU) of a market of concern, who are ahead of a market trend and have preferences to solutions to the needs found in the market. Though LU search methods are found to work for some specific cases, the reasens why the LU search method succeed or fail in finding LU are not clear yet. This paper proposes a method of searching LU and confirm its effectivity by using gaming simulation designed for needs and solution information diffusion among users community including LU.

Outline：These days, many organizations have been paying increased attention to evaluation system to change the behavior of the workers. According to an official survey, about 20% organizations point out that "the result of evaluation cannot be accepted by workers" is a problem. In the research of equity, individuals compare the ratio of their outcome to input with others'. Recently various types of indices are commonly used in evaluation systems. This partly implies that the reason why the result of evaluation is hardly accepted lies in the difficulty of knowing others input. We focus on the difficulty of knowing others input, and analyze the effect of evaluation system on equity and organizational performance by using agent-based-social-simulation.

Outline：In the theme park, to reduce congestions of queuing at attractions many management policies such as information presenting board or priority tickets. There have been some researches trying to support park manager's decision making by applying agent-based simulation to analyze differences between management policies of presenting congestion information. Previous researches showed that the effectiveness of policies strongly depends on specific situations due to the uncetainty of the system essentially has. Then, we apply micro-dynamics analysis of the influence that the situation and agent's uncertainty have by focusing on micro behavior of agents, and try to support park manager's decision making.

Outline：There are some research reports that promoting taking holidays with pay gives a positive impact on the economic system. The rate of holidays with pay taken by Japanese employees is remarkably lower than that in Europe and US. One reason of such a low rate in Japan is due to the working environment as organizational culture. We need to consider individual situations of organizations for exploring promotion policies of holidays with pay. In this study, using an agent-based model where agents select their actions based on the norm of the organization, we conduct simulation to examine the effectiveness of the policies for planned holidays with pay in different situations.

ISSN：03854221

Outline：The purposes of this paper are to build an agent-based model to explain knowledge dynamics in front office and conduct a scenario analysis for evaluating several functions of knowledge acquisition system as one of knowledge management instruments. Conventional agent-based analyses have tackled to some knowledge management problems in organizations. However they did not considered service characteristics when building their model. So we expressly model the characteristics of service co-creation processes between customers and service agents based on some findings in the field of service research. Finally our simulation with the model shows the possible changes of organizational productivity and customer satisfaction by using some scenarios, and then clarifies the reason that why the changes occurred by investigating agents' micro behaviors.

Outline：The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of agent-based social simulation (ABSS) in a decision making process under uncertain and complex problem situations. It is too difficult to determine a common purpose of the stakeholders who have various concerns and values. Moreover we cannot easily identify the stakeholders who should be included in the decision making process. Conventional systems approaches are useful to explore purposes and to ensure fairness in the problem situations. In addition to the approaches, we try to introduce ABSS to support a policy making among various stakeholders in a specific organization. Consequently we reveal that ABSS is helpful to deal with the problem situations successfully.

ISSN：0914-5206

Outline：The purposes of this paper are to find users'innovations in the mountain climbing product market in Japan, then to identify the attributive and structural characteristics of innovating users who develop the users'innovations. It has been pointed out that manufacturers should utilize the users'innovations in their new product development processes. However there have been few cases that a manufacturer actually utilized users'innovations to develop a new product. This is partly because the manufacturer could not recognize the importance of utilizing the users'innovations or could not find users'innovations in the market. This paper shows mainly two results based on statistical analysis. First this paper shows that there exists a certain number of innovating users in the mountain climbing product market in Japan and some lead users who developed commercially successful products even though experts familiar with the market observed few innovating users. Second this paper identifies a formula to distinguish between innovating and non-innovating users. The results given in this paper provide manufactures with incentives to find and utilize users'innovations in their new product development processes.

ISSN：1342-5668

Outline：Stakeholders of a complex agent-based model (ABM) need to understand and accredit the ABM, that contains the results of scenario analysis provided by ABM analysts, when we design management systems in an organization with social simulation. There are two problems for understanding and accrediting complex ABMs: (1) The results described by complex micro–macro dynamics often hinder the stakeholders from understanding the results by reading analysts'documents; (2) Most stakeholders adhere to find a difference between the reality itself and the ABM that consists of essential factors. We proposed a methodology that facilitates stakeholders to understand an ABM by playing a card game with adequate similarities to the ABM, and we confirmed whether the methodology can generate effective card games by having four preliminary experiments.

Outline：Recently various enterprises have been interested in "service" as a point of contact with customers. IT tools are introduced to support knowledge sharing in an organization for solving various customers' need to improve customer satisfaction. However it is difficult to formalize and share service knowledge. This study tries to verify the effectiveness of an organization performance by introducing the information systems for the knowledge search support in a service-oriented organization.