Simulation of Conflict Contagion in Customer Collaborative Product Innovation

Customer collaborative product innovation (CCPI) is a novel pattern of new product development (NPD) to integrate customers and their knowledge as the main innovative agents and resources. In CCPI, conflict is an intrinsic and inevitable phenomenon. Conflict contagion, however, is a neglected but crucial issue for the CCPI conflict management. In order to study the mechanism and process of CCPI conflict contagion, this paper uses the idea of SIS epidemic propagation as reference, and develops a Conflict-SIS (C-SIS) model through adopting the cellular automata (CA) method and the SIS epidemic model. Based on the C-SIS model, we simulate the process of CCPI conflict contagion, and verify the influence of different setting and factors on the conflict spreading trend. The simulation result well reflects the conflict contagion characteristics of real CCPI system. (Received, processed and accepted by the Chinese Representative Office.)