A strategic framework to evaluate businesses in collaborative networks from the green innovation perspective

The automotive manufacturing industry is vital to economic growth and sustainable development. However, it contributes to significant environmental challenges, including carbon emissions, energy consumption, and resource depletion. In order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of automotive manufacturing companies, this article proposes an evaluation framework based on multi-criteria decision-making methods from the green innovation perspective. In the developed approach, the independent weights of the criteria and their sub-criteria are calculated through the improved fuzzy preference programming method and the weighted influence nonlinear gauge system technique is applied to analyse the interdependencies between the criteria and determine the dependent weights of the sub-criteria. Data from Kia Motors in South Korea, SAIPA in Iran and their collaborative network are applied to validate the proposed approach. Kia Motors and SAIPA are considered as knowledge-intensive and lagging-behind companies, respectively. The results show that although the collaborative network performs better than SAIPA, it is weak compared to Kia Motors. Finally, the weaknesses of SAIPA and the collaborative network are identified and strategies are presented to improve their performance.