Identifying Relationships Between Eco-innovation and Product Success - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 181

follow clear probability structures which are typically required by statistical mod-
els (Zhang 2010 ).
The proposed approach enables the description of subjective judgements and
objective indices taking into account the crisp and fuzzy numbers. For instance, the
number of project team members may be described in the accurate form, whereas
the resistance of sharing information may be described in the fuzzy form. As a
result, the evaluation of success rate for a new product seems to be more complete
and suitable. The application of fuzzy set theory allows the linking of numeric
information (gained from ERP system) with linguistic information (gained from
employees). The next section presents an example of the use of the proposed
approach to forecast net profit value for a product in the development process.
5 Proposed Methodology Example
The illustrative example consists of three parts that refer to the presented
methodology:
• using fuzzy weights to describe the subjective judgement of employees,
• using ANNs to determine the relationships between input output variables,
• forecasting of net proit for new product and if-what analysis for determining
directions of changes.
5.1 Description of Eco-product Implementation with the Use
of Fuzzy Weights
The use of the proposed methodology to evaluating implementation of eco-innova-
tion is presented in Table 4 .
The procedure of obtaining the score for each indicator consists of the follow-
ing stages:
1. Evaluation of the importance of each indicator by employees (e.g. from R&D
department)
2. Calculation of the average of fuzzy values for each respondent
3. Calculation of the average of fuzzy values for each indicator, e.g. “Our unit
management often uses novel systems to manage eco-innovation”
4. Calculation of the score for each eco-dimension (organization, process,
product)
For example, on the basis of weights presented in Table 4 , the indicator “Our unit
management often uses novel systems to manage eco-innovation” is evaluated as
follows: respondent 1 chose the weight 0.3 for “Neither agree nor disagree” (3),
and the weight 0.7 for linguistic variable “Agree” (4), which gives a result of 3.7
(0.3 3 + 0.7 4).