Integrated innovative product design and supply chain tactical planning within a blockchain platform

Abstract

In globalised manufacturing and production environments, companies increasingly tend to exploit public contribution advantages within designing, manufacturing and marketing processes. To be benefited from outbound capabilities, this paper presents a tactical supply chain planning model to integrate the designing process in the form of open innovation within the supply chain main processes. In this regard, a fuzzy mathematical model is proposed to optimise the tactical decisions according to supply chain objectives and open innovation considerations. On the other hand, intellectual property issues and protecting the rights of innovators are significant concerns that sometimes avoid companies to be engaged in open innovation initiatives. Therefore, this paper proposes a registering mechanism in which the ideas and creative works are collected, refined and finally approved within a blockchain platform. Furthermore, in order to deal with epistemic environmental uncertainty, the fuzzy set theory is utilised. To investigate the applicability of the developed model, a case study in home appliances domain is employed. The results show that the company can achieve favourable designs by spending approximately 1% of the supply chain total cost. Additionally, benefiting the registering mechanism can decrease the cost of using non-original designs more than 41%.