Ranking absorption practices of knowledge for collaborative innovation: Which is the ideal multi criteria decision method ?

This paper focuses on evolving an absorptive capacity (ACAP) assessment tool designed to help firms understand their ACAP maturity in processing external knowledge. ACAP maturity is evaluated based on a firm's capacity and willingness to do relevant ACAP practices. Although an earlier version of the ACAP tool was able to evaluate maturity and highlight immature practice, it could not determine how critical these practices were for improvement action. Thus, a means of eliciting the importance of practices and aggregating it with their ACAP maturity evaluations is needed. This paper provides summaries of the subjective weight elicitation methods and aggregation techniques which were identified from the domain of multi-criteria decision making. Criteria for comparing these methods are defined and analyzed to determine the most appropriate methods for the current application. The SRF method for subjective weight elicitation, aggregated with the maturity evaluations through weight sum models, is deemed the most appropriate for the current application. During testing with users, the SRF procedure was found to suffer from various usability concerns which will be investigated in future work.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)