Value creation framework for tourist destinations based on designable evaluation network

While the tourism industry has grown rapidly in recent years, overtourism has become a major problem at tourist destinations. One way of dealing with overtourism is to discover novel potential tourism resources. There are problems with the existing methods for doing so. The first is that it is difficult to discover such resources in areas where there are no resources attractive enough to be potential tourism resources. The second is that direct changes in tourist destinations are required to create new potential resources, but direct changes would entail great human and financial costs. Therefore, in our study, we aimed to construct a framework for creating new value in local communities by designing social support systems that support the communities. To construct the framework, we propose the designable evaluation network (DEN), which is a network that expresses the evaluation relationship between evaluation subjects (people or artifacts) and evaluation objects (people or artifacts) in a local community. In addition, the relationships in DEN are formed by the designable evaluation model (DEM), which is a mathematical model with designability. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conducted a case study to discover novel potential tourism resources in Kyoto, Japan. As a result, two potential resources could be created by designing the order in which resources are visited. That is, new value was created by designing a social support system in a tourist destination community without directly designing the tourist destination. Furthermore, it can be seen that social network analysis with DEN can lead to novel ideas that contribute to new ways of managing tourism.