Categorizing the Driving Affecting Factors on Iran’s Carpet Industry competitiveness by Fuzzy Topsis Technique

Abstract
One of the most prominent and important problems of Iran industries is the lack of competitiveness and the major reason among several various reasons is due to the absence of a defined approach for competitiveness. During this study, by testing an integrated model and presenting it as the research final model, we are trying to categorize the driving affecting factors on Iran’s carpet industry competitiveness. Thus, one of the new Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques – Fuzzy Topsis- was applied. The components of research conceptual model which has 3 main criteria (internal resources, market situation, and innovation strength) and 44 sub criteria was categorized by Fuzzy Topsis technique. Accordingly, “market share”, “e-commerce”, “knowledge creation’, “industry reliability”, and “exporters expertise and skills” were recognized as the most important sub criteria and simultaneously “customers satisfaction”, “employees’ education”, “international certifications”, and “fundamental researches” were recognized as the least momentous and effective sub criteria. These results represent that Iran’s hand-made carpet industry has still some difficulties in applying marketing knowledge such as: on line marketing, e-commerce, and making merchants familiar to these techniques. In addition, paying excessive attention to the quality, durability, and appearance of the Iranian carpets make managers to ignore some other factors such as customer satisfaction. Among the main criteria, market-based perspective was chosen as the most leading and significant criterion. In other words, the approach of position improvement in the international markets is recommended for this industry.