Designing a multi-division model of national innovation capability promotion based on social network analysis

Purpose This study aims to design a national innovation capability appraisal model. This would indicate Iran’s competitiveness situation among regional countries and suggest factors influencing Iran’s performance promotion. Design/methodology/approach The methodology included four sections: bibliometric analysis to discover intellectual evolution of innovation capability and related concepts; construction of a multi-division structure of national innovation capability according to the clusters extracted from bibliometric results, and experts’ opinions; creating dynamic network data envelope analysis (DEA) according to designed structure, and analysis of Iran’s performance among regional countries; identification and prioritization of the factors extracted from experts’ opinions that improve Iran’s performance in created network using Fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method. Findings The contemporary bibliometric analysis by its extracted clusters proved the necessity of a multi-division for measuring national innovation capability performance that each division and indicators of each step were designed according to clusters concepts. In designed structure, dynamic network DEA results revealed the weakness of Iran’s performance in the third division in the transformation of patents and high-tech imports to high-tech and creative exports, which led to proposing improving factors by getting experts’ opinions to enhance Iran’s performance in this division by prioritizing them. Research limitations/implications One of the limitations of this research was that the indicators used in three phases of national innovation capability in DEA were extracted only from the World Intellectual Property Organization database. Another limitation was the number of experts in focus group sessions because due to the difficulty of gathering them in one session, the researchers lost the participation of some of these recognized experts. Also, the research concentration was on the improvement of the third phase of national innovation capability, in which Iran’s performance was weak. Originality/value Creating a relationship between the divisions of dynamic network DEA, as a national innovation capability appraisal model, and the concepts of clusters extracted from reviewing the intellectual structure and evolution of innovation capability and related concepts.

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Decision Making Towards Efficient Team Selection in Global Software Development

For successful completion of any software project, an efficient team is needed. This task becomes more challenging when the project is to be completed under global software development umbrella. The manual selection of team members based on some expert judgment may lead to inappropriate selection. In reality, there are hundreds of employees in an organization and a single expert may be biased towards any member. Thus, there is a need to adopt methods which consider multiple selection criteria with multiple expert views for making appropriate selection. This article uses an intuitionistic fuzzy approach to handle uncertainty in the expert's decision in multicriteria group decision making process and ranking among the finite team members. An intuitionistic fuzzy Muirhead Mean (IFMM) is used to aggregate the intuitionistic criteria's. To gain confidence between criteria and expert score relationship, the Annova test is performed. The results are promising with p value as small as 0.02 and one-tail t-test score equals to 0.0000002.

Assessing the New Product Development Process for the Industrial Decarbonization of Sustainable Economies

This study aims to find out the significant stages of new product development process for the industrial decarbonization of sustainable economies by using interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). The findings demonstrate that commercialization is the most significant process of new product generation process of industrial decarbonization. Moreover, it is also concluded that with respect to the sub-criteria, cost analysis, and performance evaluation have the highest weights. An effective cost analysis is required in the new product development process. The costs of the product development process can in some cases be much higher than anticipated. This situation eliminates the effectiveness of the newly developed product. In this context, companies need to make the necessary plans for the costs of these new products correctly. On the other hand, it is important to follow the costs in detail during the process. Otherwise, the product that does not provide a cost advantage will not be preferred by industrial companies. This will cause the actions to be taken to reduce carbon emissions to fail.

Soft clustering and interval type-2 fuzzy set based inference strategy for I.T. personnel selection

Impreciseness and uncertainty are the fabrics that make life interesting. For decades, human beings have developed strategies to cope with uncertainties and automate them. In personnel selection for the I.T. field, selectors often find it very difficult to select candidates by going through a set of resumes containing similar kinds of skills. Hence the selection task becomes a fuzzy decision making with the uncertainty involved. A combination of fuzzy clustering and Interval Type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FS) is proposed in such scenarios. An experiment is conducted over a resume dataset containing fifteen hundred resumes for a particular job description. Firstly, Fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) is applied for selective clustering, while decision-making under uncertainty is carried through IT2FS. The candidates in the selected cluster are given a score for ranking as per the skillset criteria. The final decision for shortlisting the resumes is carried through IT2FS. The model shows an average accuracy of 88.2% with an F1-score of 0.76 compared to (K-means + IT2FS) model with an F1-score of 0.72. Thus, the proposed model performs better while decision-making under uncertainty.

Hybrid Approach to Corporate Sustainability Performance in Indonesia’s Cement Industry

This study aimed to create a solid framework for decision-making in Indonesia’s cement industry, emphasizing those factors which bring about the most impactful results. The framework was developed using the fuzzy Delphi method, the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory, and a fuzzy Kano model. This study builds a hierarchical structure to approach the impact of corporate sustainability performance. We classify important factors into causes or effects and further identify those factors which are critical to improving the performance of Indonesia’s cement industry. Although corporate sustainability performance is a crucial topic in today’s business environment, sustainability strategies remain underrated in Indonesia. We confirm the validity of 19 factors within the following dimensions: environmental impact, social sustainability, economic gain, technological feasibility, and institutional compliance. The sub-dimensions of community interest, risk-taking ability, and regulatory compliance were identified as causes of perceived risks and benefits. In contrast, the following factors were identified as critical to improving corporate sustainability performance: renewable energy resources, contributions to charity, the perception of management regarding technology as a differentiator, and firm readiness to collaborate with high-tech companies.

Consensus-based multidimensional due diligence of fintech-enhanced green energy investment projects

The purpose of this study is to provide a hybrid group decision-making approach to evaluate fintech-based financial alternatives for green energy investment projects. First, the multidimensional factors of due diligence for fintech-based financing alternatives of green energy investment projects are identified. In this regard, the balanced scorecard perspectives are considered. Next, consensus-based group decision-making analysis is performed. Second, impact-relation directions for fintech-based financing alternatives of green energy investment projects are defined. For this purpose, the spherical fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) methodology is applied. The novelty of this study is its proposal of a new outlook to due diligence of fintech-project financing for renewable energy investments by using the group and integrated decision-making approaches with spherical fuzzy DEMATEL. The findings indicate that customer expectations are the most essential factor for the revenue sharing and rewarding models. Additionally, this study identified that organizational competency plays the most important role with respect to the peer-to-business debt model. In contrast, the conclusion was reached that financial returns have the greatest importance for the equity sharing model.

Preface to the Special Issue on “Applications of Fuzzy Optimization and Fuzzy Decision Making”

During the last decades, fuzzy optimization and fuzzy decision making have gained significant attention, aiming to provide robust solutions for problems in making decisions and achieving complex optimization characterized by non-probabilistic uncertainty, vagueness, ambiguity and hesitation [...]