How do enterprises determine which breakthrough invention should be commercialized? A multiple attribute group decision-making-based method

Abstract

The problem of selection of breakthrough inventions to be commercialized (SBIC) is significantly important for innovative enterprises. As the processes of commercializing breakthrough inventions are time-consuming and high-cost, enterprises have to tradeoff among all possible inventions and determine which inventions should be commercialized. SBIC refers to a process in which multiple experts are invited to evaluate the potential of all inventions from multiple aspects and based on their assessments, the breakthrough inventions to be commercialized are chosen. Hence, the essence of SBIC is consistent with multiple attribute group decision-making (MAGDM). This paper proposes a MAGDM-based model to help enterprises conduct SBIC. In our model, probabilistic dual Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy sets (PDPHFSs) are utilized to represent DMs’ evaluation information, which can express DMs’ evaluation information comprehensively. Then, an attributes’ weights determination method is proposed to handle MAGDM with unknown weights information. Afterwards, we extend the classical projection model into PDPHFSs and introduce a novel MAGDM method and its detailed calculation process is illustrated. Finally, our MAGDM method is applied to an SBIC problem to show its effectiveness. Comparison analysis is conducted to show the advantages of our method.