Identifying Crucial Attributes of Sustainable Operation for Scientific Instrument Platforms With a Fuzzy Synthetic Cause-Effect Model

Abstract

Scientific instrument platforms (SIPs) and their operation appraisal have received extensive attention in recent years. However, SIPs struggle to incorporate sustainability into their organizational strategies and implement it in their innovation and business activities to improve their performance levels. This study adopts a SIP sustainability evaluation framework and develops a fuzzy synthetic DEMATEL approach to evaluate the mutual influence between the attribute criteria based on the opinions of diverse stakeholders within the SIP system. The findings suggest that operational characteristics, mainly including organizational reputation, construction goals, staff welfare and external services, drive the current SIP performance. Interactive control of top management and executive’s action plays a major role in sustaining an excellent SIP, while becoming a central issue for most SIPs at the current development phase. The contribution of this study is to shed light on why some successful SIPs are able to achieve their goals and remain prominent, and how those inefficiently operated SIPs should capture and change the failing properties to positively and practically improve their bad situation.