Detecting Risk of Intellectual Property (IP) Leakage due to Reverse Design in Collaborative Product Development Environments

Intellectual Property (IP) leakage during collaborative product development is drawing more and more attentions nowadays. Unlike most of existing research, which is focused on the effect of IP leakage on the supply chain’s material and information flows, we propose a reverse design based conceptual model of information leakage during collaborative product development environments. In addition, a generic extensible framework is proposed to detect and estimate the IP leakage due to reverse design. Specifically, we propose an inference model to obtain inferred knowledge based on public knowledge and shared knowledge. We also present an algorithm to detect potential IP leakage due to reverse design in collaborative product development environments when potential competition may exist between a product partner and the manufacturer. An industrial example is used to demonstrate the problem and our proposed approach.