Document Type : Original Article

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Management and Economics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran.

Abstract

In many knowledge-based companies, entering export target markets is very important. The aim of the current research is to design and explain a competitive intelligence decision-making model for the decision to enter/not enter export target markets. The current research is exploratory and mixed in terms of purpose, and practical in terms of results. The statistical population in the qualitative stage included knowledge-based companies' activists, who were conducted with 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews using the theoretical sampling method until reaching theoretical saturation, its validity and reliability were checked using the content validity ratio and the Kappa-Cohen test method. In the quantitative section, due to the limited statistical population, Morgan's table was used, and 327 companies were investigated using a questionnaire whose reliability and validity were confirmed using Cronbach's alpha and confirmatory factor analysis, respectively. To answer the research questions: 1- Knowledge-based companies were classified into two clusters based on the 8 dimensions of competitive intelligence based on the Davis-Bouldin index. 2- Using qualitative research, 59 predictive components of competitive intelligence to enter the export target markets were identified. 3- In order to achieve the optimal model, conventional modeling methods and collective modeling methods were applied on the set of variables resulting from three feature selection methods. The results showed that knowledge-based companies are in a distinct situation in terms of having competitive intelligence, and accordingly, their decision-making models to enter export target markets will be different.

Keywords

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