When human networks collide: the degree distributions of hyper-networks

The study of service value networks adds a new dimension of investigation to industrial systems: human networks. Existing literature shows humans hyper-network to co-create value within and outside of the traditional structures of an organization or an extended enterprise—such as social networking for innovation and e-commerce for supply chain. Since human networks tend to be composite and multi-dimensional, they need new results to understand how networks collide during economic activities and what new coalesced networks will result. The hyper-network model uniquely describes this multi-layered evolving nature of human networks and reveals some of the basic networking properties either directly from the initial community base networks or directly from the colliding single networks. This article answers an important question about service value networks: What are the connection patterns of a network of networks, such as the distribution of the number of connections at a node—the degree distribution? We develop formulae to determine four prototypical classes of hyper-networks, which constitute a baseline analysis to the new study of network evolution for network science and service science.