Evaluating technology innovation capabilities of companies based on entropy- TOPSIS: the case of solar cell companies

Technological innovation capability (TIC) refers to a fundamental ability owned by an organization to invest and reorganize production factors in technology innovation for gaining competitive advantages. It has attracted increasing attention to evaluate enterprises' TIC in a competitive market. However, the existing methods have some limitations in the accuracy and efficiency of assessing TIC. This paper proposes a novel approach of evaluating enterprises' TIC, which combines the entropy weight method and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) based on patent information. Entropy can determine the weights of indicators that help improve the rationality of the weighting. Besides, TOPSIS may reasonably rank the calculating results, which helps solve poor results in a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. The paper takes seven enterprises in the solar cell technology field as samples to illustrate the proposed method. The results show that the Entropy-TOPSIS method can effectively evaluate enterprises' TIC and is more suitable for small samples.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a new method that combines entropy weight method and TOPSIS to evaluate enterprises' technological innovation capability (TIC), which effectively addresses the limitations of existing evaluation methods and has been verified in a small sample of the solar cell technology field.