evaluation of innovative performance of knowledge based company by network data envelopment analysis-game theory approach

the performance evaluation and efficiency measurement of software companies and compare them together as a set of knowledge-based activities due to the unknown of internal processes and stages common to these companies and ignoring these processes in performance evaluation by data envelopment analysis models and how to consider these processes and procedures for calculating efficiency of each stage and overall efficiency of each company are the issues that this article effort to study them. the main objects of this study are determination the common stages and processes of innovation activities in software companies and measurement of the innovation efficiency of each stages and the overall efficiency of each company over a period of four years. the literature review and experts interviews revealed that each company has two series stages of knowledge production and exploitation processes. to determine the efficiency of each stage and the overall efficiency we used network data envelopment analysis- game theory approach. the modeling is done by the leader-follower method or stackelberg game for two stages and their solved using gams software. the results show that the overall efficiency of all companies is less than one and in the first stage, only two of the 38 companies and in the second stage, only three of them are full efficient. it is suggested that inefficient firms at every stage follow its determined benchmarks to improve their operations.