Use of multicriteria decision aid methods in the context of sustainable innovations: bibliometrics, applications and trends

Abstract

Sustainable innovation has gained prominence in recent years, due to the demands imposed by global competition, social pressures and the needs of consumers and the environment. Decision-making processes about sustainable innovation are complex and often require auxiliary instruments to reduce uncertainties. Multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) methods can be a useful tool to make these kinds of decisions more assertive. This article presents the main discussions and theoretical approaches through bibliometrics on the application of MCDA methods in the context of sustainable innovations. We used the R package Bibliometrix library to organize the data of the publications and perform the processing for the generated analyzes. The bibliometric analysis provided an overview about the use of MCDA in sustainable innovations (MIS) and it presents citation analysis; identification of central authors through co-citation analysis; main topics, conceptual structure and thematic evolution of the literature by co-word analysis. As main results, we identified the main trends in MIS: there has been a substantial increase in publications on this theme, and the most explored focuses are “product development, production and distribution” and “environmental or social impact assessment” and there is an opportunity to further explore the focuses of “evaluation or selection of projects, suppliers or resources”, “product life cycle management or assessment” and “definition of decision criteria and standards for sustainable innovation performance”. In addition, several MCDA tools have been successfully used for studies of sustainable innovations, demonstrating that there is no preferable method to use for a given focus.