ABSTRACT
Nowadays, the increase of competitiveness within the globalization markets has pushed companies to collaborate between them in an open innovation (OI) context, to develop higher innovation products, with reduced time-to-market and costs involved, when compared to a “closed innovation” scenario. Such collaboration has often resulted into Virtual Enterprises (VE), which has brought some challenges to the management board in terms of new product development (NPD), particularly with regard to the risk management, compromising in some cases the viability of the NPD project. From the literature, there are a leakage of models regarding NPD that allows to manage risk in OI context, by including the risk’s influence of each product’s process on the entire NPD, as well as the subjectivity regarding human perception, related to risk analysis. By bearing in mind such issues, we have developed an approach, based on fuzzy logic, to support risk managers on NPD in an OI context. The importance of the different risks involved here will be defined by using the AHP method. A case study regarding the development of an electric vehicle will be presented here to evaluate the model’s robustness, whose benefits and eventual barriers/challenges found will also be discussed.
