Risk evaluation of customer integration in new product development under uncertainty

• We evaluate risk of customer integration in new product development.
• The approach integrates rough set theory and group AHP together.
• It can manipulate subjectivity and vagueness without much prior information.
• The rough method can discern the change of decision makers’ preferences.
• The rough method can flexibly reflect risk propensities of decision makers.

This study mainly focuses on the risk evaluation of customer integration in new product development. Customer integration in product innovation projects has been widely recognized a best practice to enhance innovation success rate and reduces the development cycle time, but it also has many potential risks including loss of know-how, much dependence on customer, and limitation to incremental innovations, etc. Unfortunately, there are few researches about risk evaluation for customer integration which is important to the risk management of the co-innovation process. Further, evaluating customer integration risk involves much subjectivity and vagueness. To manipulate this problem, a novel evaluation approach for assessing customer integration risk under uncertainty is proposed. The novel approach integrates the merit of rough set theory in handling vagueness and the strength of group analytic hierarchy process (GAHP) in modeling hierarchy evaluation. Finally, an application in a project of mobile phone development is provided to demonstrate the application and potential of the methodology.