JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Year:2011 | Volume:3 | Issue:3|Papers Count:15

Since technology has an essential role in enhancing competitiveness, technology strategy is one of the most important components of a firm’s strategic orientation, especially in technology based industries; so researchers have paid attention to the linkage between technology strategy and business strategy of firms and its performance implications. Based on configuration theory and a survey, this research seeks to empirically investigate the linkage between technology strategy, business strategy and performance in Iran’s electronics industry.The results suggest that technology strategy plays a supportive role to business strategy and it is critical toward creating competitive capabilities especially for focusers and differentiators; and if technology strategy suffers from internal inconsistency problem and/or inconsistency with business strategy then poor business performance is expected.

This paper has two purposes. The first is evaluation of innovation criteria in West-South Asia Countries as well as benchmarking of Irans' position in the region. The second purpose is description of integrated application of PROMETHEE and Entropy techniques for outranking. Initially, for these purposes, criteria of innovation assessment were determined. Then Entropy used for weighting of criteria and PROMETHEE for outranking of alternatives/countries. Results show, according complex innovation indicator, Lebanon, Georgia, Emirate, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kazakhstan are the first to the seventh rank. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyz and Jordan are the seventh to tenth rank in the same group. And Pakistan, Oman, Syria situate have weak situation.

This paper contributes to the appraisal of the most important sociological approach about the nature of scientific knowledge. The classic sociologists of science have presented a “rational” approach about scientific knowledge. According to this “rational” or “standard” approach, science is a rational, common, asocial phenomen that is without effect from social and cultural interests. New sociological views based on “relative (cultural) epistemology” consider a cultural and scientific nature for scientific knowledge. Then, the idiom of “scientific knowledge” as “mirror of nature and reality” passed over and standard view went in doubt. New sociologists of science with slogan “science as culture” suggest that scientific knowledge is always part of culture and can't be imagine any status for it out of culture. On the other hand, science as a social and contingent practice doesn’t have certain base in reality and it must be considered as a completely social-cultural activity that has basic connection with values and social-cultural ideologies. The theorisians of “sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)” and followers of social-political movements that criticize science are some of the most important represent of this cultural approach that we describe their theories. At the end, cultural approach will be criticized.

This study clarifies the scientific-technical cooperation environment of Iranian Nanotech companies via quantitative investigation of the relationships among companies and scientific and research centers and analysis of their current situation. There are limited information and statistics available about high-tech firms in developing countries like Iran. Therefore, conducting such research is necessary for optimal decision and policy making in this field. In this article, research and development cooperation network of Nanotech firms in Iran has been studied using social network analysis and expert judgment method. Data has been collected through interviews with managers of twenty-four Nanotech companies and their relationships with other organizations have been extracted. Then, the network map and prominent actors were identified. Results of the study show that 95% of cooperations were of the type of providing services and the remaining were strategic alliances. It was also revealed that Nanotech companies have little cooperation with industrial groups and prefer to provide products for end-usres over positioning themselves in the value chain of other industries. This study presents a proper image of research and development cooperation network of companies for policy makers and businesses and recommends strengthening and development of strategic alliances in order to enhance the overall efficiency of the network.

The present research investigates the governance structure of seven science and technology (S&T) collaborative networks founded from 1995 to 2005 in I.R. of Iran. Conducting a qualitative inquiry and using multiple-case study method, researcher has collected related data adequately from semi-structured interviews with key informants, observation, and archived documents. In this article, several types of governance structures and key actors of S&T networks as well as roles of the actors are described and classified. We used the content analysis method and cross-case analysis technique to derive some implications from the processed data. The paper concludes that S&T networks in Iran, have utilized two main types of governance structure namely: participative and hierarchical. The hierarchical structure enhances the power of the network director but decrease the social capital of the network, while the participative structure leads to the reverse results. The study shows that a number of factors affect the type of network’s governance structure such as; network’s main financial sponsor and the position of network’s founding organization in contrast with network’s members.

In this paper, the research subjects’ priority setting and budgeting problem of economic activities has been investigated. Economic activity is named to an activity in which a person or a group of people produces goods or provides services using requisite information, raw materials, equipments and space. A scientific method has been presented for prioritization and budgeting of research subjects based on economic activities’ scores and priorities. The proposed priority setting method is a process of two phases. In the first phase, the scores of research subjects are individually determined for each economic activity. In the second phase, the final scores and priorities of research subjects are calculated based on scores of economic activities as well as the derived results from the first phase. In addition, a hierarchical approach has been employed for budgeting of research subjects. At the end, in a case study, the proposed method has been applied to prioritization and budgeting of 21 research subjects related to three economic activities of the agriculture section and the results have been illustrated.

This article is extracted from a research project entitled “pilot study of science and society survey” that is done as first Survey of public understanding of science and technology, in this from, in Iran and among residents of Tehran.The Problem statement of present paper explains the necessity of doing periodical studies about public attitude and understanding of Science and Technology as a project for monitoring the country’s scientific development. In the theoretical and conceptual framework, we indicate to deficit models (scientific Literacy and public understanding of science) and public participation and engagement, and experiences of other countries have been examined with emphasis on indexes and measures of their surveys.The Main bulk of the paper is constituted by description of data and results of public understanding of science and technology in Tehran, with a comparative view and glance to data from other countries. The questioner of study formulated by a set of open and closed-ended questions, through using the other countries’ experiences and insights obtained from interviews with Iranian experts. Statistical sample is selected by random sampling technique. Data have been analyzed by SPSS and LISREL Softwares.In conclusion section, some new hypothesis have been provided for future study and some suggestions have been proposed for improving the methods of measuring the public understanding of science and technology in Iran.