Complexity Measurement Model and Methods of Crowd Intelligence Collaborative Innovation for Design Activities

Crowd intelligence (CI) innovation has become an important product innovation tool in the environment of Internet as it can amass huge design resources outside the enterprises through online community. It is an important way for enterprises to expand design capabilities, solve design problems, and realize transformation and upgrading. The design activity complexity of crowd intelligence collaborative innovation is difficult to quantitatively describe. As a result, it leads to the absence of a quantitative basis for the release, push, and dynamic adjustment of design activities in the Internet innovation community. To solve these problems, a design activity complexity measurement method based on information entropy theory is put forward. First, the characteristics of the collaborative design process in Internet innovation community, as well as user types and capacity characteristics are analyzed. Second, three dimension including process complexity, problem complexity, and solvability complexity, are proposed to valuate design activities. Then, the quantitative methods are proposed on the basis of information entropy theory. Finally, the suspension design of project LM SF-01 in the Local Motors community is used as an example to calculate its complexity. The complexity in the three dimensions are respectively 318.15, 477.66 bit, and 134.46 bit. According to the characteristics of user participation, the weighted complexity of the design activity is 331.76 bit, which validates the effectiveness and feasibility of the complexity measurement model.