A comprehensive evaluation of determinants in collaborative R&D partner selection of small businesses in Taiwan

Despite the increasing number of firms committed to R&D strategic alliances over the past few decades, a large number of alliances have failed because of the incompatibility of the partners. The purpose of this study is to evaluate comprehensively the determinants, particularly for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that affect collaborative R&D partner selection. In this study, a two-stage Fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach (FMCDM), combined with the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) and Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Processing (FAHP) was adopted. Two sets of experts were chosen from the SME Technology-Intensive Clustering Assistance (TICA) project to participate in the research study. In this study, we discovered that two contributions to the selection of collaborative R&D partners among SMEs lead to the successful formation of R&D alliances. First, we provide a framework for solving the problem of multiple-criteria decision making in the process of selecting collaborative R&D partners among small firms. Second, we comprehensively evaluate the determinants that influence the success of the collaborative R&D partner selection process (particularly for SMEs) in the future.