An Idea Evaluation Phase in Online Communities: A Case on the COVID-19 Innovation Platform

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only created public health issues but also sectoral problems and economic crises. As a response to this unexpected phenomenon, online communities have also started initiatives to tackle it. One of these initiatives was carried out in Turkey. Innovative project ideas were gathered from entrepreneurs and potential contributors regarding the problems brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program occurred over three months (April 2020 to June 2020) through an open innovation platform in Turkey. The scope of this program is to collect business ideas from entrepreneurs and potential contributors, mature ideas with mentors and other entrepreneurs, and select the best ones by jury. In the process of evaluating the ideas, the weighted sum method (WSM) was used by the jury. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the effectiveness of the WSM via online communities in the idea evaluation phase. To demonstrate how this, we implemented different multi-criterion decision -making (MCDM) methods to the decision matrix dataset. We compare the results of WSM to those of the other two well-known (TOPSIS and VIKOR) MCDM methods. Besides, we conducted regression and sensitivity analysis to further clarify the differences between the results. Thereafter, we combine the rankings obtained from three MCDM methods by applying three aggregation methods as a compromise solution for the final decision. We find that the decision-makers can use WSM, TOPSIS, VIKOR, and aggregation methods separately according to the criterion weighting and the level of confidence in the scoring of the alternatives.