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Exploring R&D Influences on Financial Performance for Business Sustainability Considering Dual Profitability Objectives

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Submitted:

30 September 2017

Posted:

30 September 2017

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Abstract
The influence and importance of research and development (R&D) for business sustainability have gained increasing interests, especially in the high-tech sector. However, the efforts of R&D might cause complex and mixed impacts on the financial results considering the associated expenses. Thus, this study aims to examine how R&D efforts may influence business to improve its financial performance considering the dual objectives: the gross and the net profitability. This research integrated a rough-set-based soft computing technique and multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods to explore this complex and yet valuable issue. A group of public listed companies from Taiwan, all in the semiconductor sector, was analyzed as a case study. Initially, more than 30 variables were considered, and the adopted soft computing technique retrieved 14 core attributes—for the dual profitability objectives—to form the evaluation model. The importance of R&D for pursuing superior financial prospects is confirmed, and the empirical case demonstrates how to guide an individual company to plan for improvements to achieve its long-term sustainability by this hybrid approach.
Keywords: 
business sustainability; research and development (R&D); multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM); financial objective; variable-consistency dominance-based rough set approach (VC-DRSA); internetwork relationship map (INRM); directional flow graph (DFG)
Subject: 
Business, Economics and Management  -   Business and Management
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.

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