Utilizing an ANP framework for prioritizing effective criteria on industrial clusters' formation

Clustering plays an important role on developing industries, since business units can take advantage of many existing industries for trouble shooting or sharing their experiences to increase efficiency. One of the primary concerns for developing clustering is to identify and remove important barriers. In this paper, we gather experts' feedbacks on forming clustering in Iran's industries and, using analytical network process, we prioritize the important factors and provide some necessary guidelines to develop clustering. The results of this paper indicate that the existence of a supplier network is the most important factor, followed by the existence of competition between operational units, existence of high-risk investors, existence of suitable infrastructures. There are also other less important criteria including the existence of flexibility, suitable technology and competition, governmental regularities, social background, trust, etc.