A decision model approach for determining social innovation potential of technological projects

Since project management is inevitably a social effort involving all relevant actors, social aspects have to be emphasized when considering collaborative project management. Social innovation focuses on reacting to social demands and developing innovative solutions to overcome various social issues. Therefore, determining the social innovation potential in the project management process is very important. The main purpose of this study is to propose a Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) and Fuzzy VIKOR (FVIKOR)-based decision model to determine the social innovation potential of technological projects. The results of FANP revealed that the most important criteria for determining social innovation potential of projects are financial resources, technological developments and social capital. Furthermore, FVIKOR was used for ranking social innovation potential of the selected technological projects. There are several managerial implications of this study. First, we suggest that practitioners should integrate the proposed model into their project evaluation processes. Second, they can also use this model to define the social innovation factors during project selection. Lastly, the proposed model can be employed to prioritize the social innovation factors that enable managers to allocate the appropriate resources to project management process.