Designing New Business Development Program Based on Systems Engineering Methodology with Participatory Systems Analysis in Small and Midsized Enterprise

Developing new businesses is one of the important activities in Japanese companies. There have been many training programs or professional services for developing new businesses in this country. However, most of them have been designed for large enterprises that are rich in resources. On the other hand, small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) that are poor in resources have little access to such programs or services. Meanwhile, SMEs comprise 99.7 % of the total number of Japanese companies. In order for Japan’s economy to have sustainable growth, business development in SMEs is critically important. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a system to design training programs for developing new businesses for SMEs. It employs systems engineering methodology with participatory systems analysis. The evaluation result indicates that this system is quite effective and means a lot for SMEs. By applying systems engineering in service design, our study shows that the designed programs could provide high customer satisfaction, even if they were designed by nonprofessionals.