Fuzzy multiple criteria selection of government-sponsored frontier technology R&D projects

Selection of government-sponsored frontier R&D projects is made difficult by the coexistence of the conflicting participating parties, the availability of experts for new frontier technology review, and the ambiguity of new frontier technology. This paper presents a model that includes (1) using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method to integrate various expectations from different interest groups into evaluating objectives/criteria, (2) the group-decision method by technical experts based on the predetermined objectives/criteria, and (3) the fuzzy approach in scoring the subjective judgments of the experts. The results reveal that differences of weights toward each criterion exist among various groups. The government and academia care more about social benefits, the researchers are more concerned about intellectual properties, and the experts from industry emphasize the importance of feasibility. The method presented in this paper was applied at a national research institute in Taiwan. The results reveal that: (1) the approach can solve the disparity between the profound knowledge required for evaluation and the different expectation from various interest groups, (2) the fuzzy approach is suitable to frontier technology R&D project selection because of the vagueness of the nature of frontier technology and the difficulties in evaluating quantitatively and accurately.