Assessing commercial viability of technology start-up businesses in a government venture capital under intuitionistic fuzzy environment

Abstract

Governments around the world are increasingly showing keen interests in venture capital investments in technology start-up businesses. However, determining the commercial potential of a new Technology start-up business is generally seen as a complex exercise especially in a government-controlled setting where selection of candidates can be clouded by several peripheral considerations. To generate more interests in decision-making models aimed at assessing the commercial viability of candidate start-up businesses in a government-run venture capital, this study (1) provides a modified form of the Strategic Technology Evaluation Program (STEP) called G-STEP as a new selection criteria for a government-controlled venture capital scheme (2) adopts a comprehensive intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS framework with a sensitivity analysis component for the assessment of early stage but high potential tech start-up firms and (3) demonstrates its applicability with a numerical example assessing the commercial potential of start-up businesses in a Government technology venture capital program. The proposed decision-making framework could be useful in the assessment and selection problems in other government priority areas. © 2016, Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.