Guest editorial

The constant socioeconomic transformations that have marked the 21st century mean that individuals are continually in contact with social, economic, political and technological changes. This has given rise to a new type of consumer who is more informed about, critical of and sensitive to organizations' performance. Decision problems have thus been complicated by an ever-greater degree of complexity due to clients' higher expectations. Economic agents often have to seek out fresh approaches, methods or techniques that can support their decision-making processes and improve their organizations' performance (Belton and Stewart, 2002).

MCDM and MCDA are well-known acronyms for multiple-criteria decision-making and multiple-criteria decision analysis, respectively. Although epistemological differences exist between these two branches of management science/operational research (cf. Roy, 1985; Roy and Vanderpooten, 1997; Carayannis et al., 2018), both approaches focus on decision aids and constitute valuable tools for structuring and evaluating complex decision situations. Keeney (1992) argues that these techniques can build on expert participants' knowledge in any given field and produce assessment systems based on these specialists' values and experience. Zavadskas et al. (2014) and Ferreira et al. (2019) report that this field of research has grown exponentially over the past few years and benefited from important advances since the dawn of contemporary multiple-criteria decision aid studies in the early 1960s.

This special issue seeks to bring together recent developments and methodological contributions within MCDM/A in entrepreneurship, technology assessment and/or business development. Selected out of more than 60 initial submissions, the 14 contributions included are diverse, wide-reaching and reflective of MCDM/A's vast range of potential applications. Notably, the papers included in this special issue have not been selected based on the type of MCDM/A technique used but instead by the way they are aligned with the main focus of the special issue and further engage the readership on the topic. Because this special issue highlights the great potential of MCDM/A methods in the fields of entrepreneurship, technology assessment and/or business development, as well as demonstrating the important role of these approaches as decision-making aids, we believe that it will alert management practitioners, policymakers and researchers to recent theoretical developments and real-life applications of these methodologies.

In closing, we wish to express our gratitude to the authors, whose contributions have been essential to completing this special issue, and reviewers, who devoted time and effort to providing critical evaluations and constructive suggestions for how to improve the manuscripts. Finally, this project could not have been completed without Patrick Murphy and Andy Adcroft's support. We are indebted to them for their faith in this project and the opportunity to bring it to fruition.