The AHP-based decision making on innovation trajectories in public research and development organisations

Executive staff of public research and development (R&D) organisations worldwide are continuously faced with the challenge of exploring several innovation trajectories to attain their vision. The decision making in this paper is reliant on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) conducted in a case study drawn from Thailand, an example of a developing country where public R&D dominates the research landscape in science and technology. The AHP study provides a set of innovation factors as the criteria to meet the goal of selecting the highest impact plan on innovation factors. The findings reveal that the plan focusing on commercial orientation has higher impact than the plan focusing on societal orientation. However, given that the selected case study is a taxpayer-funded public R&D organisation, the societal expectations have to be factored into its innovation plan. A sensitivity analysis was therefore employed, which indicated potential for a mixed orientation considering both the commercial and societal orientation plans.