Abstract: Influenced by internal and external risk factors such as customer demand uncertainty, technological change, scheme error, a small number of components are prone to design change risk events. In the context of complex inter-component dependency and concurrent development, the design change of one or a few components may trigger the potential design change risk of other dependent components, resulting in design change risk propagation. The propagation of design change risk brings great uncertainty to complex product development (CPD), which may lead to serious project delay, budget overrun, and low quality. Complex products contain a large number of components, which cannot be independently developed by a single organization. Therefore, CPD projects mainly adopt the form of multi-organizational collaboration network. Although networked form has the advantages of reducing the cost of development and realizing complementary resources, it further increases the complexity of design change risk management in the face of design change propagation, which poses a great challenge to the CPD projects. Therefore, it is of great significance to consider the role of organizations and reveal the propagation law of design change risk under the influences of organizations.

Key words: complex product development project; design change risk; risk propagation; organizational failure; organizational cooperation