RESEARCH OF COMPETITORS IN THE ACTIVITIES OF BUSINESS ENTITIES

Abstract

The key factor to activities of business entities survival is acknowledging the competitive actions of their competitors. In this regard, the use of analytical tools in competitor analysis to support the entrepreneurial activities's performance is one thing that needs to be done by business entities to face global & local competition. However, systematic literature resources are limited in the field of unifying the process of analyzing business competitors that influences the action plan of the entrepreneurial companies, leading to strategic failure or improper planning due to lack of content provision. Thus, to enrich research resources, the analytical paper aims to analyze and systemize the types and methods of competition research arranging these in the same multi-criteria based unifying framework to deal with the different needs and processes of conducting competitiveness research in entrepreneurship that is called in this paper “competition research decision making”, and developed in this paper. To achieve this objective, criteria for analysis are determined through an extensive literature review and a structured questionnaire that is prepared to collect data from experts through a personal interview. Then, a multi-criteria-based decision-making tool that can be used as the modelling device for analysis has been applied for measuring the importance level of each criterion on the scale of 1 to 9 and to develop a hierarchy of criteria for importance. The finding of this research is expected to strengthen the existing knowledge of competitiveness research and make business entities ready to adopt and use the proposed unifying framework of competitor analysis on their business processes. Finally, the paper provides theoretical and practical implications as well as future research agenda