Network centrality analysis in customer collaborative product innovation design process

To find crucial innovative agents and core synergetic relationships quickly in the customer collaborative innovation system (CCIS) and improve the stability of the system, a centrality analysis method of network based on complex networks theory is suggested. In the solution, the topological structure model of the customer collaborative innovation network (CCIN) is presented first of all and collaborative agents and their synergetic relationships are visualized. Then, the heterogeneity of the CCIN is verified by network structure entropy. On these bases, the centrality of CCIN is analyzed based on Delta theory and the network efficiency function. Moreover, the feasibility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by a typical CCIS case.