Structured selection of partners in Open Innovation communities: an IF-TOPSIS based approach

Purpose – Open innovation (OI) literature suggests that firms can improve their innovation performance by learning from a large set of actors in the innovation process. However, although this premise, the extant literature has rather completely overlooked the ‘who’ question: which partners should be included in the different phases of the innovation funnel? How should they be selected? This paper, while focusing in the early phases of the innovation process, offers a list of possible criteria for partner evaluation and suggests a structured methodology for their selection. An empirical test of both the criteria and the methodology is presented with reference to a company operating in the Advanced Underwater Systems sector. Design/methodology/approach – In order to support a group of decision makers (DM) in the complex process of selecting partners at the beginning of OI process, we propose a peer-based modification of intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) multi-criteria group decision making with TOPSIS method (peer IF-TOPSIS). The combination of IF set theory with TOPSIS, IF-TOPSIS allows coping with subjectivity, imprecision, and vagueness in group decision-making problem under multiple criteria.Originality/value – This work contributes to the extant literature in different ways. Firstly, it is one of the first papers in the OI literature to focus on the ‘who’ issue, giving firms indications on how selecting the external partners. Secondly, this paper advances the criteria that could be used in the selection process, avoiding focusing on single specific aspects of the collaboration phase or on specific types of partners (suppliers). Lastly, while providing an example of empirical application in a real context, it extends the application of IF-TOPSIS to a challenging decision problem – never considered before in the decision making literature. Practical implications – This work provides firms which are in the early stages of OI processes with a set of criteria for selecting partners and a structured methodology supporting the decision process.