Interval-valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach Research Articles

Identifying and prioritizing the barriers to green innovation in SMEs and the strategies to counteract the barriers: An interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy approach

Increasing environmental burdens and the importance of innovation in the presently competitive environment have encouraged small- and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to adopt and implement green innovation practices. This process, however, is faced with many limitations and obstacles. The purpose of this study is to propose a framework to identify barriers to green innovation in SMEs and to provide solutions/strategies to overcome such barriers. Using the systematic literature review (SLR) method and the opinions of 20 experts, the study primarily identified 29 sub-categories of barriers falling under seven main categories including “management”, “organization”, “human resources”, “financial resources”, “external cooperation”, “customers, markets or competitors”, and “the external environment.” Similarly, 22 strategies were discovered that could help to counteract the barriers identified. To determine the weights of the barriers, the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Multiplicative Best-Worst Method (IFMBWM) was used. The strategies, too, were ranked through the Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy MULTIMOORA (IVIF-MULTIMOORA) method. Then, a sensitivity analysis and a comparative analysis were applied to confirm the robustness of the proposed method and ensure the consistency of the obtained ranking of alternatives. As the results revealed, the optimal and effective solutions that could be used by policy-makers/managers to overcome the barriers to green innovation were “simplifying authorization and licensing procedures”, “effective environmental laws and regulations”, “shared responsibility throughout the supply chain”, “a supportive organizational culture”, and “merit-based selection of managers.”

IT outsourcing through group decision-making based on the principles of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy theory

The past decade has seen tremendous growth in the global use of information technology (IT) as a pivotal tool to gain competitive advantage. Organisations and enterprises often seek to optimise their IT-related operations by using the best available internal and external resources to achieve the greatest profit or output attainable through this technology. This has led to the increasingly important role of IT outsourcing in today's managerial and administrative approaches. The present study proposes an IT outsourcing model that employs an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy approach. The proposed approach uses the Shannon entropy in intuitionistic fuzzy environment to determine the weight of experts and those of IT outsourcing criteria. These weights are then used to obtain the aggregate expert opinion matrix based on the principles of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. The intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS is used to prioritise the suppliers. The proposed model is implemented for a governmental organisation with seven supplier- and six IT outsourcing criteria.