Co-evolution of Products & Communities in Mass Collaborative Product Development – a Computational Exploration

Mass collaborative product development (MCPD) refers to a paradigm where large numbers of people collaborate globally as communities to develop products and services. It is based on bottom-up evolution as opposed to traditional top-down decomposition. The evolution of products developed through MCPD processes is coupled with the evolution of associated communities. In this paper, the co-evolution of products and communities is modeled as a complex self-organizing system. The proposed approach is based on agent-based modeling and Social Network Analysis (SNA). It allows the modeling of participant behavior within MCPD scenarios and captures the information about i) products as modules and their interdependencies, and ii) participants as decision-making agents. The evolving community is modeled as a weighted directed graph and analyzed using SNA metrics. The following aspects of the product development processes are studied: evolution of modules, evolution of number of participants associated with modules, community structures, effort distribution, distribution of the number of collaborating partners, and the effect of product dependencies on the community structure.