Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify risk factors that caused by customer
collaboration in new product development systematically, and propose an approach to judge
which risk factors are critical and catch substantial attention.
Design/methodology/approach: This study identifies risk factors according to the results of
study retrieval, experts’ evaluation and consultation, and case studies of enterprises in china. On
this basis, an improved rough number approach is put forward to evaluate the importance of
risk factors.
Findings: Firstly, classify risk factors into three aspects. Then, present a risk factor set, which
include thirty-seven risk factors. At last, determine which risk factors are critical by using an
improved rough number approach.
Originality/value: Considering there are few researches studying comprehensive risk factors of
customer collaboration and assessing them, this paper explores a risk factor set of customer
collaboration in product development stage, and proposes a novel approach, which can help to
solve the problem of subjective, vague and lack of prior information of evaluation, to evaluate
risk factors.Peer Reviewe
