Fuzzy multiple criteria selection of government‐sponsored frontier technology R&D projects

Abstract

Selection of government-sponsored frontier R&D projects is made difficult by the coexistence of the conflicting participating parties, the availability of experts for new frontier technology review, and the ambiguity of new frontier technology. This paper presents a model that includes (1) using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method to integrate various expectations from different interest groups into evaluating objectives/criteria, (2) the groupdecision method by technical experts based on the predetermined objectives/criteria, and (3) the fuzzy approach in scoring the subjective judgments of the experts. The results reveal that differences of weights toward each criterion exist among various groups. The government and academia care more about social benefits, the researchers are more concerned about intellectual properties, and the experts from industry emphasize the importance of feasibility. The method presented in this paper was applied at a national research institute in Taiwan. The results reveal that: (1) the approach can solve the disparity between the profound knowledge required for evaluation and the different expectation from various interest groups, (2) the fuzzy approach is suitable to frontier technology R&D project selection because of the vagueness of the nature of frontier technology and the difficulties in evaluating quantitatively and accurately.

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis

“…Of related interest are the applications of [63][64] which seek to support resource allocation using a MAUT frame -although these do not constitute portfolio selection models, as utility functions are assessed directly on levels of investment with no intervening concept of a discrete project as a vehicle by which money is transformed into value. From the mid-1980s one starts to see the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and subsequently the Analytic Network Process (ANP) emerge as a competitor to MAUT [65] [66][67] and a popular extension seems to be to combine the AHP with fuzzy numbers [68] [69]. Of particular interest in this area is the work by [70] which uses both MAUT and AHP, and seeks to compare both approaches; also [71] describes an application of a technique called the Judgmental Analysis System (JAS), but like the AHP uses pairwise comparison data, but …nds scores using geometric least squares rather than eigenvalue decomposition.…”

Public selection and financing of R&D cooperative projects: Credit versus subsidy funding

“…However, few works have examined the criteria used by government evaluators to select projects (Hsu et al, 2003;Om, 1996, 1997). Knowledge of these criteria is crucial for two reasons: first they reflect the real objectives of policy makers and, second they determine the characteristics of those projects that are actually implemented or developed and, consequently, the results obtained.…”

“…This has led to the hundreds of methods and techniques available in the literature for R&D project selection (Hsu et al, 2003). These approaches tend to be either qualitative or quantitative, and range from unstructured peer review to sophisticated mathematical programming (Henriksen and Traynor, 1999;Hsu et al, 2003).…”

“…This has led to the hundreds of methods and techniques available in the literature for R&D project selection (Hsu et al, 2003). These approaches tend to be either qualitative or quantitative, and range from unstructured peer review to sophisticated mathematical programming (Henriksen and Traynor, 1999;Hsu et al, 2003). In the process of R&D project selection, whatever method is used, one of the most important steps is to calculate technical and market risks (Taggart and Blaxter, 1992), a rather infrequent practice in the public sector (Bozeman and Rogers, 2001, p. 414).…”

“…One plausible explanation is offered by Hsu et al (2003) who point to two major differences between public and private sponsored projects. Firstly, public funding of R&D projects generally involves strategic and long-term investment, thus, conventional financial justification approaches are probably inadequate.…”