Title: Identification and evaluations of factors involved in industrial clusters development, applying fuzzy DEMATEL

Authors: Masoumeh Danesh Shakib; Abbas Toloie Eshlaghy; Mahmood Alborzi

Addresses: Department of Industrial Management, College of Management and Economies, Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Management, College of Management and Economies, Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Management, College of Management and Economies, Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Nowadays, industrial clusters play important roles, ranging from various aspects of social, industrial production, and offering of services. On the other hand, the abandoning of small manufacturing firms, particularly in undeveloped and less developed countries, results in such enterprises not having a considerable contribution in the gross national product and creation of added value and also results in their suffering from severe scarcity in managerial and technological scopes. However, by adopting appropriate strategies based on influencing factors on development of industrial clusters, the shortcomings can be compensated. This paper aimed to identify these influencing factors due to 25 previous years' studies and interview with experts. Also, the relationship among the factors with fuzzy DEMATEL technique was examined in order to evaluate more important and influencing factors.

Keywords: small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; industrial clusters; industrial clusters development; decision making trial and evaluation; DEMATEL; fuzzy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2017.084941

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2017 Vol.9 No.2, pp.135 - 152

Received: 20 Feb 2016
Accepted: 18 Sep 2016
Published online: 09 Jul 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article