Robustness of open source product innovation community’s knowledge collaboration network under the dynamic environment

As a complex system with open characteristics, the open source product innovation community is often subjected to failures and attacks, and the users in the community are often in a state of frequent change and mass loss. In this paper, we use complex network analysis techniques to describe the complex system as a knowledge collaboration network. We discuss how the network’s structural robustness and functional robustness changes during the three stages of network development (i.e. the start-up, growth and maturation stages) for different user loss patterns (i.e. one random user loss pattern and two deliberate user loss patterns) under the dynamic environment. We find that the structural robustness is significantly higher when the network faces random user loss than when it faces deliberate user loss for all three network development stages. In contrast, the functional robustness is higher when the network faces random user loss than when it faces deliberate user loss only for the network’s start-up stage, not its growth and maturation stages. Based on the robustness results, we provide intervention and incentive strategies to prevent user loss for all three stages of an open source product innovation community’s network development. More importantly, we contribute a new approach for systematically analyzing the robustness of the open source product innovation community under the dynamic reality environment.