An Integrated Approach for Assessing Suppliers Considering Economic Sustainability Innovation

Abstract

Innovation plays a key role for improving the sustainability performance of corporations. A truly sustainable innovative firm needs to take the social, environmental, and economic aspects of sustainable innovation into consideration. However, limited studies have investigated the economic aspect of sustainable innovation, especially in the context of supplier evaluation from emerging economies. To deal with this issue, this manuscript puts forward a criteria decision framework for evaluating economic sustainable innovative suppliers. A new methodology based on fuzzy Full Consistency Method (FFUCOM) and Improved Combinative Distance-based Assessment (ICODAS) is developed and extended using interval rough Dombi-Bonferroni operators. In the developed approach, the FFUCOM is employed to determine the criteria weights, and the ICODAS is responsible for assessing and ranking the suppliers. A case study from the manufacturing sector of an emerging economy is considered for validating the developed framework and decision model. The findings introduce the 'financial resumption of products' as the most critical economic innovation criterion for evaluating suppliers. This article significantly helps decision-makers and practitioners to better comprehend the underpinnings of sustainable innovation economic dimension, particularly when assessing their suppliers. Furthermore, the applicability and validity of the proposed model was confirmed by the results of sensitivity analysis. Findings demonstrated that the proposed method is a solid and useful MCDM framework, and its outputs are precise and acceptable.