Selection method of customer partners in customer collaborative product innovation

Abstract

Partner selection is an important aspect of the customer collaborative product innovation process and aims to select innovative customer partners from huge numbers of customers, fast and accurately. The purpose of this article is to present a quantitative partner selection method based on the complex network theory. In this method, the complex network model of the Online Community Customer Network (OCCN) is constructed, and network centrality is used as the initial index of customer partner selection. Then, network efficiency and delta centrality are used to evaluate the effect of the index. An example is presented to reflect the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method. Results validate the small-world and scale-free properties of the OCCN and show that betweenness centrality is the most appropriate index for partner selection in the OCCN.