Analysis of new product mix selection at TFT-LCD technological conglomerate network under uncertainty

Since new product development (NPD) is characterized by a tremendous degree of complexity and uncertainty, no single development approach within a firm will necessarily lead to a final successful product. To increase the possibilities of having products developed successfully, NPD mix is usually selected in practice, and this leads to an even more complicated and uncertain problem of choosing an appropriate set of new products. In addition, surviving independently in a high technology industry is very difficult, and a firm needs to take serious consideration of technological conglomerate network (TCN) in NPD selection. There are currently few mathematical or effective models practically proved to be able to handle these critical and complicated issues, and this is the challenge of the research. Critical success factors (CSFs) of NPD in TCN is first discussed, and 10 CSFs within three groups are selected. While analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a popular multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, is capable of dealing with the aforementioned managerial problems by generalizing subjective judgment of experts, human judgment is usually imprecise and vague. To compensate this deficiency in AHP, a fuzzy AHP model is proposed, and a firm is able to select the most appropriate product mix for development by applying the model.