The evaluation of technologies in open contexts

Technologies play an important role for firm success as they contribute to create value and to strengthen the firm position relative to competitors. But Technologies are also resource-consuming. Therefore, managers have to get most out of technologies, while getting the best use of resources, properly allocating them between the most promising technologies. The extant literature has put forward many tools and models in order to support managers in choosing the technologies to be boosted or abandoned, but they mainly concentrated on a few criteria relative to internal or co-developed technologies. However, since the above argumentations (contribution in terms of competitiveness/value vs. consumption of resources) are true not only for internal/co-developed technologies, but also for external ones, it emerges the need for a tool which on the one hand enlarges to an ample set of criteria for evaluating technologies’ competitiveness and value, and on the other is open to external technologies as well. This paper, while offering a list of criteria for the evaluation process, extends to external technologies. Also, it proposes a peer-based modification of intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) multi-criteria group decision-making with TOPSIS method (peer IFTOPSIS) in order to coping with subjectivity, imprecision and vagueness in Group decision-making problem under multiple criteria. An empirical test of both the criteria and the methodology is presented within a company operating in the Advanced Underwater Systems sector.