Nominal Ranking Methodology: Strategic Information Management Principles for Commercialising Inventions

Abstract

There is a growing need to use strategic intelligence (SI) to navigate from an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, to an environment with strategic vision, understanding, clarity, and accuracy. The ability to clarify complex environments, enables organisations to reach accurate decision-making quicker and avoid elements of surprise. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be part of the problem and the solution to decision-making fatigue. For example, AI agents can liberate time-poor analysts to focus on tasks where human value-add lies in human sense of reality, applying their expertise and tacit knowledge. The research objective is to identify SI clusters relevant to strategic decision-making in complex business environments. The research question is: what relevance does SI have in complex environments for accuracy in strategic decision-making? The PRISMA method for systematic literature reviews was utilised for this research paper, combined with Vosviewer co-occurrence mapping, which produced five clusters linked to SI to navigate complex environments. This paper describes a systematic review of secondary data to investigate SI in complex environments and presents the findings of SI clusters with its relevance to accurate interpretation of data and information for strategic decision-making. The paper highlights the role of SI coupled with the rapid development of tools such as generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI used in complex environments for accurate interpretation. This research used Boolean search strings to gain access to relevant articles, 115 articles were retrieved with only ten articles meeting the criteria for analysis after the use of the PRISMA method and the application of eligibility criteria. The recommendation is that in complex environments strategic decision makers must combine their human analytical strengths with the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the processing of large volumes of data, information, and knowledge. By combining SI and agentic AI, strategic decision makers turn complexity into opportunities for innovation and sustainable growth. In the agentic era, accurate decision-making requires a human in the loop.