Identifying and Prioritizing Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Hamadan’s Smart Urban Transportation Using a Mixed-Methods Approach and Fuzzy VIKOR

Rapid urbanization has confronted cities such as Hamadan with chronic transportation challenges, including structural weaknesses in public transit and traffic congestion. On the one hand, the smart city approach, by offering technological solutions, holds significant potential for transforming these problems into entrepreneurial investment opportunities. On the other hand, growing uncertainty in identifying priority opportunities increases the risk of financial and managerial resource wastage. Hence, a systematic prioritization of these opportunities is an essential requirement for the targeted allocation of investments. The aim of this research is to identify and prioritize entrepreneurial opportunities in smart urban transportation in Hamadan using a mixed-methods approach. In the qualitative phase, six final opportunities in the form of products/services were extracted through a systematic review of documents and case studies of smart cities. In the quantitative phase, 16 experts from academia, the municipality, the city council, and smart city practitioners weighted the evaluation criteria through pairwise comparisons and assessed the performance of the opportunities against these criteria. The criteria were weighted using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), and the opportunities were prioritized using the Fuzzy VIKOR method. The inconsistency rate of the judgments (0.02) confirmed the reliability of the weights. The findings indicated that "availability of technological infrastructure" (weight 0.165), "market demand" (0.158), and "market growth potential" (0.135) were the most important criteria. The final ranking revealed that "traffic flow management" (VIKOR index 0.0206) and "smart bus and taxi systems" (VIKOR index 0.0322) were the top priorities, while "electric vehicle charging stations" (VIKOR index 0.1752) was the lowest priority. These results suggest that opportunities with the highest alignment with existing infrastructure and market demand hold greater priority for investment. By converting urban challenges into prioritized opportunities, this study provides a decision-support roadmap for entrepreneurs and urban managers.