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The majority of Czech managers are aware that the long-term competitiveness of the company depends primarily on the use of innovative technical solutions and investments in new technologies. Despite awareness of the importance of innovation, many companies do not know how to manage, implement, and evaluate them. Empirical research showed that most innovation firms implement, but do not systematically manage the implementation of innovative projects and the allocation of funds. There is a contradiction between companies’ ability to orientate themselves in the approaches available in the area of innovation management and the existence of a large number of approaches that can be used to address a particular type of innovation problem. A set of innovation concepts has been created to solve those challenges. Practical steps of the decision-making mechanism for selecting innovation concepts have been proposed. The decision-making mechanism is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and serves primarily for managers of medium and large enterprises.

The aim of this applied research is to focus on real-life application of multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methods and their adaptation in a way which can be acceptable for business practice. The study will apply the group decision making methods on a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a type of performance measurement and strategic decision making. The study is mainly concerned with multiple criteria decomposition method of analytic network process (ANP) method, WINGS technique and entropy. This group of methods had been already applied in several business domains. However, majority of the implementation was only presented as an example how it could work in practice, but they were not investigated from the perspective of how much information they could provide to the management. In this paper, proposed methods will be used to determine which criteria are most important for the company within the Balanced Scorecard and results of all methods will be compared. The aim of this study is, by utilizing group MADM approach, to discover the areas of the BSC which must be improved so that a total performance increases.

Since its introduction the MADM techniques had witnessed a great development and popularity among scholars. Their application range from very basic towards more sophisticated using MOLP and fuzzy operations. However, many scholars and authors have researched various possibilities of MADM practical use but it seems the real business hasn't caught up with the same enthusiasm. Hierarchical and network thinking is very important for any strategists and entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, contemporary attitude towards decision making is not in favor of rigorous process. The most frequent plea is that the speed and efficiency should prevail when the real business environment is much more dynamic and turbulent. So entrepreneurs and managers have difficulties in filling in the questionnaires for comparing the criteria and alternatives. The lack of agreement in the criterion evaluation and compromise thus limits the application of MADM techniques. Another problem is associated with a large number of evaluation criteria that is often needed and the network of interdependencies. This paper deals with a review of applications that can be considered as useful in real business and based on empirical research proposes a suggestion of specific tasks that could be used and accepted in real business. The paper consists of summary of relevant literature then follows short description of applied methods, description and results of empirical research and concludes with proposal of several business tasks that could be facilitated by selected MADM methods.

Decision making is an integral part of all business processes. Some decisions are spontaneous and others time consuming, requiring detailed information about their implications. Decision making can be performed according to perspectives that may also be conflicting in nature. Models that are helpful in dealing with such problems are multi-criteria decision-making methods. The most important method in this group is the analytic hierarchy process. The principle of the analytic hierarchy process is the distribution of the main parts into smaller and more detailed elements and thus the creation of a structured problem. The aim of this paper is to select the optimal form of asset acquisition (loan or leasing) according to clients' selected criteria using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a sensitivity analysis to assess the resulting rank of alternatives. Based on the criteria, financial leasing with a high down payment was selected as the best alternative. By means of the sensitivity analysis, it was found that the best alternative is not sensitive to a change in the weights estimated by the AHP.