JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Year:2012 | Volume:4 | Issue:4|Papers Count:7

Over the last two decades development planners were working to develop some new approaches about regional development. One of the developed methods is “Regional Innovation System (RIS)”. In this approach, innovation is obtained from intra-firm resources and it can impact the inter-firm relationships and networking in regions. The aim of this article the role of the intra-firm characteristics in improving networking interactions and their capabilities in stimulating innovation in the Tabriz Metropolitan Region. To that end, a survey method was employed. Documentary and library data elicitation techniques were also applied to study the existing theoretical principles and approaches in the field. We used stratified sampling for determining the sample size. The findings show that internal resources of firms, particularly the proportion of the qualified staff to the total workforce, the size of firms and research expenditures respectively, have the most significant effect on innovation introduced by firms. Moreover, it was found that. The role of the intra-firm characteristics has not had strong effects on innovative capacities and regional networking in the region. The findings of this study also indicate that both the intensity of the intra-regional networking in the interactive learning and consequently the innovation capabilities of firms do not have statistically significant relationships.

Iranian political and governance philosophy opposite to blind mimicking. Islamic-national perspective of governance has given distinctive characteristic to its theoretical outcomes and managerial and policy making. There are two  schools of thought for generating Islamic-indigenous knowledge and national –Islamic knowledge based on Islamic centers and universities. However, this political system has monitored managerial and policy making in other countries. National observatory will  focus attention to external events, will increase Iranian national strategic intelligence, and will reduce costs of trial experiments of policy making and managerial practices. The purpose of this paper is exploration of its theoretical rationale, operational conceptualization, and enumeration of challenges faced by the national observatory.

A considerable part of technology development policy making is related to the encouraging policies of firms’ absorptive capacity of technology. On the one hand, according to the strategic importance of aerial industry especially avionic sector and also according to the rapid technological changes in this sector, the policy makers have tried to develop appropriate solutions to improve absorptive capacity of these firms in recent years. On the other hand, a cursory review of the absorptive capacity literature shows a lack of focus on the effect of the organizational orientation and managerial perception on technological capacity building.. Thus, this article tries to respond this important question by development of an appropriate model to improve the absorptive capacity of the firms of avionic sector - as a dynamic sector with increasing changes- by focusing on strategic orientation and environmental dynamic perception of managers. Accordingly, after doing explorative study and presenting conceptual model, the number of 111 avionic firms was surveyed and their data were analyzed completely. Then, the relationships among variables and the severity of them were specified by the method of structural equation model. Finally, strong relationship between absorptive capacity and strategic orientation and also relatively strong relationship between strategic orientation and managerial perception of environmental dynamicity were confirmed. Based on the results of this investigation we recommend remedial policies to the aviation policy makers.

The aim of this research is to analyze the scientific effects of sabbatical leaves from agricultural faculty member's view. Methodologically, this research was carried out based on survey strategy. The sample of this research consisted of 166 faculty members of public agricultural universities and colleges of Ministry of Scientific, Research and Technology that were selected by randomized stratified sampling method. A questionnaire was used to collect data and its face and content validity was established using comments of a some researchers and reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed according to calculate Cornbrash's alpha. Some items in Liker Scale measured research constructs. Based on calculated coefficient of variations each item of research constructs were prioritized. In order to determine direct and indirect effects of independent variables on finally usefulness of sabbatical leaves (as independent variable) the path analysis techniques by calculate multiple regression was employed. The results of path analysis showed that "international professional interaction" has most impact with path coefficient 0.835. "Perceived process of sabbatical leaves" (0.821), "perceived personal benefits" with direct effect (0.735), "scientific professional performance" with indirect effect (0.451) and finally "perceived negative impact" (-0.231) are ranked in other positions. Finally, according to research findings some recommendations are provided to promote effectiveness and usefulness of sabbatical leaves.

One of the main duties of faculty members of universities is the applied and basic research for developing boundaries of knowledge and technologies. Unfortunately, in spite of the importance of research the number of approved research projects at the Tabriz University is lower than the number of the expected research projects at the universities in the country. The purpose of this article is to identify obstacles to research from the viewpoint of faculty members of the Tabriz University. We used opinion survey method in this study. The population studied consisted of 690 full time faculty members of Tabriz university. We randomly selected 134 respondents for the survey. We developed a questionnaire, which included five parts: social – cultural, economical, organizational, educational & obstacles. Face validity of questionnaire was accepted by the faculty members. And instrument reliability was obtained 93 percent by Cronbach's alpha. These data were analyzed by Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), T-test, Tokay, and Kruskal –Wallis statistics. Results have shown that according to the viewpoint of faculty members, all five categories are considered the obstacles to research activities. They have identified economical and personal obstacles are the least important obstacles. Furthermore, this study has revealed significant relationships between viewpoints of faculty members and gender, ranking, courses, faculty and performance responsibility; however, there is no significant relationship between viewpoints of faculty members and their service records. Finally, suggestions are given for decreasing their researches activities obstacles.

Due to considerable changes in the consumer demand and rising competition in the world markets, firms are under the intensive pressure to maintain their competitive power in the long run by innovation. Clearly, accessing innovation is possible only through research and development activities. Therefore persuation of R&D in firms and recognition of factors that influence R&D activities is very important. The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of probability of Research and Development activities in the industrial manufacturing firms of Iran using Heckman and Tobit regression models and Survey Data Collected by statistical center of Iran in 2008. The results of Heckman and Tobit models estimation indicates that R&D intensity in firms have positive correlation with firm size, ownership dummy, market concentration, human capital and profitability of firms. However export variable has not significant effect on of Research and Development activities.

One of the methods for firms to be successful in information technology industry is to reduce the probability of the failure by adopting flexible scenarios and developing strategies for the development. Among the current scenario-making methods is the uncertainty approach using Global Business Network (GBN) method. In GBN, each scenario is made out of the cross-impact of two or three driving forces that have a high associated uncertainty. On the other hand, each scenario has a series of variables that interact with each other and every tiny change in each of these variables would have a huge impact on other variables. This can be extremely important in the field of policy making. Thus, scenario modeling as a dynamic system can make decision makers capable of realizing the future risks and opportunities. Using system dynamism approach, in this paper a dynamic model of a scenario in the field of communications, along with a pre-foresight plan will be offered. Then using Vensim software, we will study the effects of different components of this scenario on each other in five different situations in identifying the variables that have the strongest effect in the growth of the GDP. We also examine the effect of government’s budget on the IT infrastructure development and on the production of ICT equipment. Additionally we specify how the mentioned increase in the government's budget will affect the governmental supportive policies (loans and tax exemptions) or the investments of the private sector.