Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advanced Engineering Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aei Full length article A novel approach for capturing and evaluating dynamic consumer requirements in open design Shipei Li, Dunbing Tang ⁎ , Jun Yang, Qi Wang, Inayat Ullah, Haihua Zhu College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Consumer requirements Open design Fuzzy Delphi Similarity-based filtering Dual-index evaluation ABSTRACT In the product design, understanding consumer requirements (CRs) is essential due to the fact that it influences the success of the product. Currently, it has been recognized that consumer involvement in an open design (OD) environment is an effective way to reduce the gap between what is required by consumers and what companies can provide. In the process of OD, the initial CRs may shift as the consumers can influence each other, and it is a challenge to capture and evaluate dynamic CRs in OD. In this study, the dynamic relationship between con- sumers who participate in OD is discussed based on Nash equilibrium. Corresponding to the dynamic re- lationship, a novel approach is proposed to explore the crucial CRs from consumers’ perspective. Initially, the platform of OD is constructed on the Internet to collect the CRs and its evaluations. Thereafter, a similarity-based filtering method (SFM) is presented to filter out the most differentiated evaluations. Furthermore, to get the weight of the CR evaluated by consumers, an improved fuzzy Delphi method is introduced. Meanwhile, to solve the problem of excessive number of CRs, a dual-index evaluation method is put forward to control the opening degree of OD. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the suggested approach, a product of smartphone is examined as a case study. The results confirm that the proposed approach is appropriate for capturing and evaluating dynamic CRs in OD. 1. Introduction A successful product design has to meet consumer requirements (CRs) and also the change of the market. According to the feedback from the market and consumers to the company, timely upgrading and optimizing products can increase consumers’ satisfaction [1]. The in- formation of CRs is of vital importance in the product innovation pro- cess, production operation and marketing management. It was proved by a practical application that it is quite difficult for corporations to compromise the trade-offs between satisfying diverse CRs and reason- able production-manufacturing [2]. The appropriate information re- garding CRs can enhance the effectiveness of product design, which increases consumer satisfaction for a new product (fit to market) and thus, the product can be launched to the market successfully. To achieve a complete design, it is essential to integrate overall CRs and consumer preferences into product design. For capturing CRs, most of the traditional design methods focus on expert evaluations and ques- tionnaires to capture CRs. These methods mainly depend on designers’ opinions, and consumers express their requirements for products pas- sively. With the support of Internet technology, consumer involvement in the process of product design is becoming possible, which can reduce the gap between what consumers really need (consumer requirements) and what companies can provide (product attributes). Many studies have been conducted to explore the external resources for improving product competitiveness. Chesbrough [3] used open innovation to de- scribe innovation process in which firms can and should make use of internal ideas and external ideas, as well as internal and external market paths for advancing their technology. Durmusoglu [4] pre- sented that open innovation is collecting new information regarding various elements and technologies through external resources. More- over, Chesbrough [5] and colleagues further clarified that open in- novation is to enhance internal innovation by using purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge and external innovation by expanding market for external use. The funnel proposed by Chesbrough was based on the linear innovation model. At present, the boundaries between universities, industry and government are blurred in the new mode of technological and social innovation, in which consumers and commu- nities are actually innovators. Therefore, open innovation should be a nonlinear model in practice [6,7]. Based on the nonlinear model of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2018.12.002 Received 2 January 2018; Received in revised form 7 December 2018; Accepted 11 December 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: d.tang@nuaa.edu.cn (D. Tang). Advanced Engineering Informatics 39 (2019) 95–111 1474-0346/ © 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd. T