A New Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach in the Evaluation of Innovative Ideas

Innovative ideas can be gathered from many sources through crowdsourcing and open innovation approaches since these sources have expanded considerably owing to information and communication technologies. Innovation contests are one of the main tools to gather innovative ideas from different sources by open innovation approaches. Innovations that will provide solution to the problem of enterprises may emerge by gathering hundreds or even thousands of innovative ideas through these contests. The difficult part is the stage of selection of the best innovative idea alternative(s) by evaluating these ideas. In this study, a new multi-criteria approach is offered. In this approach primarily, alternatives which take lower score from the dominant or most important acceptance criteria are eliminated. Next, Weighted Sum and TOPSIS methods are used as multi-criteria decision methods among the remaining alternatives. After that, it is implemented one more step to show whether if the variation of weighted score of acceptance criteria affect the ranking order in each method. Hereby, a decision model proposal for innovation projects has been presented to make an alternative approach that allows both fast and correct decision making. Findings show that this method could be seriously considered as an alternative approach when there are lots of alternatives to make a decision in innovation projects

Keywords:

idea management , idea evaluation , innovation contest , open innovation , lexicographic method , TOPSIS