Paper Title
Social Network Analysis for Open Design Projects

Abstract
Current major shift in innovation and product development approaches, and the rise of the World Wide Web. Has facilitated collaboration between people, to design and to develop products via online platforms. Based on Social Network Analysis, this paper provides insights about the interaction structure in the open design projects through graphical visualization of the social interaction in addition to several network’s indicators. Aiming to distinguish and predict project progress based on its social network characters. Also, the work on this research extends to propose that both lead users and opinion leaders are vital to the success of product development in an open design paradigm. Hence, based on prior research users’ types have been identified according to their network position. In addition, this work proposes a formula to estimate the percentages for each of user’s type that participated in each project phase. It has been found that for open design projects the main influencers are the opinion leaders. Also, our results indicate that some users can possess both characters as opinion leaders and lead users. Additionally, results showed variations in social network graph and characters during different open design project’s phases. Keywords - Open Design, Innovative Community, Social Network Analysis, Lead Users, Opinion Leaders.