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

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.