A Novel Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Intellectual Property Risk Assessment in Crowdsourcing Design

Crowdsourcing design is a knowledge-intensive innovative design mode, in which there are various intellectual property risks. This paper proposes a novel multi-criteria decision-making approach for intellectual property risk assessment in crowdsourcing design. First, domain experts are invited to identify and evaluate various risk factors in the given crowdsourcing design environment, and the interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy sets theory (IVPF) is used to eliminate the vagueness and ambiguity of risk assessment opinions from experts. A combination weight method based on the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and entropy weight (EW) is designed to measure the importance degree of risk evaluation parameters, which includes risk probability (P), risk frequency (F) and risk severity (S). Then, a TODIM method is used to calculate the risk value of various factors to identify the largest intellectual property risk. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach are verified by a case. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively evaluate the intellectual property risks in crowdsourcing design.