Modelling Entrepreneurial Decision Making Process Using Fuzzy Inference Systems

Abstract

The essence of Entrepreneurship is making decisions that are constantly required to evaluate alternatives and make decisions regarding a wide range of matters. Decision making involves a lot of uncertainty and risk which poses serious challenges for Entrepreneurs to joggle among them in other to take the best decision. Study have shown that focus has been mainly on the analysis of the characteristics of potential entrepreneurs and the firm-creation process leaving the critical incredient that will help in decision making. The increasing challenges and complexity of business environments are making business decisions and operations more difficult for entrepreneurs to predict the outcomes of these processes. Hence, this paper proposes a decision support model -Fuzzy Inference System- that could be adapted for various business decision processes. This system has the capability to handle decision making, by critically considering the degree of membership of all the risk involved in a given problem space. The model uses the concept of fuzzy set theory to judiciously select the variables in a given problem space in an uncertain situations. From a real life practical point of view, this theory offers a natural approach to the resolution of multidimensional and complex problems when the available information is sparse and/or of poor quality. The fuzzy rule base sytem soften the adverse effects that a business may suffer from these uncertain factors. Keywords: Fuzzy logic, Membership functions, Decision, Fuzzy Set, Entrepreneur