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	SWOT-AHP Hybrid Analysis	Analytic Hierarchy Process for Strategic Priorities
Field	Strategic Management	Strategic Management
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	2000	1980
Originator	Mikko Kurttila, Mauno Pesonen, Jyrki Kangas & Miika Kajanus	Thomas L. Saaty
Type	Hybrid multi-criteria SWOT prioritization	Multi-criteria decision analysis via pairwise comparison
Seminal source	Kurttila, M., Pesonen, M., Kangas, J., & Kajanus, M. (2000). Utilizing the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in SWOT analysis — a hybrid method and its application to a forest-certification case. Forest Policy and Economics, 1(1), 41-52.	Saaty, T. L. (1980). The Analytic Hierarchy Process: Planning, Priority Setting, Resource Allocation. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 9780070543713
Aliases	A'WOT Analysis, Quantified SWOT Analysis, AHP-Weighted SWOT, Hybrid SWOT-AHP Prioritization	Strategic AHP Prioritization, AHP for Strategy Decisions, Pairwise Strategic Priority Setting, Hierarchical Strategic Decision Weighting
Related	3	3
Summary	SWOT-AHP, also called A'WOT, is a hybrid strategy method that quantifies an ordinary SWOT analysis by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process to its factors. Kurttila, Pesonen, Kangas, and Kajanus introduced the technique in 2000, motivated by the fact that classic SWOT lists strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats without saying which matter most. By treating the four SWOT groups and the factors within them as an AHP hierarchy and eliciting pairwise comparisons on Saaty's 1-9 scale, the method derives numerical priority weights for every SWOT factor. The result is a SWOT analysis whose factors are ranked and commensurable, so strategists can see not just what the relevant factors are but how important each one is relative to the others.	The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) applied to strategic priorities is a multi-criteria decision method that structures a complex strategy choice into a hierarchy of goal, criteria, and alternatives, then derives priority weights from expert pairwise comparisons. Thomas Saaty developed AHP in the 1970s and set out its full theory in his 1980 book, with a widely cited 1990 article distilling how to make a decision with the method. Its appeal for strategy is that it converts the qualitative judgments managers actually make — that growth matters more than cost control, say — into ratio-scale weights, while quantifying and policing the consistency of those judgments. The result is a transparent, defensible ranking of strategic options that integrates multiple, often conflicting, criteria.