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In Iran, the Bank A is one of the largest and most effective banks of the banking network. The continued success of Bank A in improving the economic level of the country and satisfying the customers depends on recognizing all banking activities and processes in the form of supply chain and performing the necessary managerial acts in order to enhance the relevant processes. In this regard, the present study aimed to improve the most effective processes of banking services supply chain of Bank A in Iran.

The present study was applied and descriptive. Research population included the heads, deputies and active experts in Bank A, who were selected through judgmental and saturation sampling methods to complete the questionnaire and participate in interviews and conference sessions. Regarding to aim of study, the integrated approach of intuitionistic fuzzy based DEMATEL-ISM was used.

According to the results, the processes of product delivery, information technology management, public relations and advertising management, risk management, and marketing and sales management exerted the most impacts on other processes in the supply chain. Finally, after designing a process improvement path, solutions were presented to improve the most effective processes.

In this research, efforts were dedicated to the recognition of the major processes of the services supply chain of Bank A, designing the process framework of the bank and improving the prioritized processes by evaluating the causal relations that exist among the processes of the services supply chain.

Considering the problems faced by the home appliance industry in Iran, such as the increase in waste, lack of information transparency and lack of traceability of manufactured products, etc. the companies in the home appliance industry are moving toward Industry 4.0 and have been prompted to use it. On the other hand, the adoption of Industry 4.0 is associated with challenges that may lead to the failure of the adoption project and the bankruptcy of home appliance manufacturers. This study identified the challenges in the implementation of Industry 4.0 on current status and provided suitable solutions to overcome the identified challenges.

In this study, a review of the literature and background of Industry 4.0 identified the challenges that influence the adoption of Industry 4.0. To measure the current status of the identified challenges, the opinions of experts in the Iranian home appliance industry were used. To find solutions to the challenges in the adoption of Industry 4.0 in the Iranian home appliance industry, a fuzzy cognitive mapping and scenario design were used.

The results of this study show that to face the challenge of data sharing, skilled personnel should be effectively promoted among workers in the home appliance industry. The results of this study also show that the barriers to cooperation should be removed to reduce the impact of the IT Security Concerns challenge.

This paper is the first article that identifies the challenges and effective solutions for implementing Industry 4.0 in the home appliance industry.

The varying nature of the competitive environment of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), contributing significantly to gross domestic product in most countries, has made their moving toward internationalization and global competition unavoidable in such a way that the life cycle of research in this area is experiencing a period of rapid growth. This study aims to evaluate the status of research on SME internationalization based on bibliographic records retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus.

Using a scientometric analysis, reviewing the important points and the boundaries of research on SME internationalization as well as practicing co-occurrence and burst detection analysis.

Through a rigorous examination of the crucial points and boundaries within the realm of SMEs internationalization research, coupled with an analysis of co-occurrence and burst detection techniques to detect contemporary hotbed topics, this study has uncovered that the predominant focus of current discourse centers around the areas of networks and networking, as well as internationalization models and entry into the global arena. Moreover, it gives insight that future investigations will shift toward enhancing SME internationalization performance, while simultaneously prioritizing the expeditiousness of their entrance into international markets. The insights garnered from this inquiry are expected to facilitate salient contributions to future literature in this area, thereby advancing our understanding of these complex phenomena.

The trend of the research in this field can be useful for enthusiasts. In this context, the life cycle of research on SME internationalization has been drawn that shows the period of research growth of publications is almost between 2005 and 2023, and the saturation will be approximately from 2023 to 2035. The top researching SME internationalization in the world have been occurred in the USA, England, Canada, Sweden countries and in Department of Management, Department of Marketing, School of Management, Faculty of Management Studies institutions. Also, most of the research has been published in Journal of International Business Studies, International Business Review and Strategic Management Journal.

This study accordingly provided a valuable perspective for future research in this line.

ISM technique is one of the tools of interest in soft operations research. The soft nature of this technique has made inevitable use of indeterminacy theories. The present research attempts to develop ISM technique and MICMAC analysis in a neutrosophic space due to the complexity and uncertainty of the decision-making environment.

In this study, single-valued triangular neutrosophic numbers is used to develop Neutrosophic ISM (NISM) and Neutrosophic MICMAC (NMICMAC). First, the general algorithm of NISM and NMICMAC is provided. In the following, the complete description of NISM steps including level value determination, Factor Leveling Algorithm and NISM digraph algorithm are presented. Finally, a description of the NMICMAC steps is described.

An illustrative example – supplier selection problem – is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and in the discussion section; the comparison and analysis of different aspects of the NISM with the previous methods are discussed.

In this study, NISM and NMICMAC are presented for the first time, so that each pairwise comparison judgment is provided as single valued triangular neutrosophic numbers. The development of the model is continued until the final stages of calculations with neutrosophic numbers, and only in the final stage the results are crispy presented. In addition, not only the factors of process are leveled, but at each level the factors are lined up and their importance is determined.

Development of each domain of knowledge depends on aggregation of knowledge and documentation of available research. This paper aims to review the articles in the field of innovation ecosystem (IE), do a bibliographic analysis of the information available about each document, explain the process of developing the concept of IE in research during the past years and introduce the forerunner countries, major, top journals, main scientific documents and authors contributing so far to the development of the concept of IE.

In this study, 1,233 papers published between 1990 and 2021 April were collected and analyzed by applying life-cycle analysis, bibliometrics and content analysis to provide a full thematic overview of the IE filed.

Results showed that initial concepts of IE emerged in 1990 and entered its life-cycle growth period in 2006 due to being accepted by researchers. This growth will continue until 2035. Moreover, top 20 countries (i.e. the most influential and productive countries), most frequently cited journals, top publishing authors and the most important topics as considered by researchers are also identified by employing bibliometrics and content analysis. According coincidence of key words, the most important topics in IE field categorized into four groups.

Unlike other works recruiting content analysis solely to identify theoretical areas within this concept, the present study used content analysis in the field of scientific research methodology, and then the most popular tools to develop the concept of IE were identified.

In today’s intense global competition, agility is advocated as a fundamental characteristic for business survival and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical methodology to achieve and enhance organizational agility based on strategic objectives.

In the first step, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) of the organization being studied are recognized and classified under the perspectives of balanced scorecard (BSC). Critical success factors are then identified by ranking the KPIs according to their importance in achieving organizational strategic objectives using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In the second step, three houses of quality (HOQs) are constructed sequentially to identify and rank the main agile attributes, agile enablers, and improvement paths. In addition, in order to translate linguistics judgments of practitioners into numerical values in building HOQs, fuzzy logic is employed.

The capability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by applying it to a case of a multi-national food company in Iran. Through the application, the company could find the most suitable improvement paths to improve its organizational agility.

A limited number of KPIs were chosen due to computational and visual constraints related to HOQs. Another limitation, similar to other agility studies, which facilitate decision making among agility metrics, was that the metrics were more industry-specific and less inclusive.

A strong practical advantage for the application of the methodology over directly choosing agility metrics without linking them is that through the methodology, the right metrics were selected that match organization’s core values and marketing objectives. While metrics may ostensibly seem unrelated or inappropriate, they actually contributed to the right areas where there were gaps between the current and desired level of agility. It would otherwise be impossible to choose the right metrics without a structured methodology.

This paper proposes a novel methodology for achieving organizational agility. By utilizing and linking several tools such as BSC, fuzzy TOPSIS, and quality function deployment (QFD), the proposed approach enables organizations to identify the most appropriate agile attributes, agile enablers, and subsequently agile improvement paths.