DECISION MAKING WITH MULTI-CRITERIA ASSESSMENT: HOW FIRMS TO SELECT APPROPRIATE COLLABORATION PARTNER?

To create unique competitive advantage is becoming essential key task in industry but the limited resources constrain these activities. The collaboration is main stream in alliance strategies to gain complementary resources to create new value for customers capture. An increasing number of Taiwanese firms are strategically collaborating with Chinese partners. The appropriate partner greatly facilitates creating synergy for promoting robust business performance. But how to select suitable partner for successful value creation turn to first topic in collaboration. We propose a systematic framework for evaluating collaborative partner selection alternatives on the basis of the substantial determinants of successful collaboration. We adopt the analytical network process (ANP) technique instead of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy AHP (FAHP) method due to real world consideration in interaction and feedback among each layer. This research incorporates partner necessary characteristics from prior literatures (e.g., trust, commitment, and complementarity) and new findings (value path, and intensity) in empirical cases into an ANP structure and uses expert insights as well as blurred data analysis to guide the selection processes of collaborative partners. The Result indicate that complementary resources is the top priority for alternatives selection in electronics components distributors (ECD) field and findings contributes significant value to the design firm’s collaborating management and bring high probability rate of successful collaboration