JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Year:2014 | Volume:6 | Issue:2|Papers Count:8

Objective operation of educational system could guaranty the national development of any countries. Whatever educated work force, scientists and engineers have learnt from training processes is a lever to country economic circulation, growth domestic product and individual money making as well. Given to fixing other effective factors, it is expected that in a well-structured educational system in favor of national goals, all people can gain equal benefits from that education system. One of the most important evaluation criteria of educational system performance is national and international standard testing programs. These testing programs which have been implementing for assessing students cognitive growth illustrate how well the students of a country can benefit from an educational system. This research was conducted to investigate performances of mathematics and technical group in national math and physics sub tests in Iranian provinces.We compared the results according to the provinces and gender from 1387 to 1391. Also, to understanding Iran’s provinces placement over international continuum on the international test, TIMSS, some statistical indexes have been reported. This study has been accomplished by ex post facto design and repeated measurement method was used to analyze providences’ data.Data sets were collected from National Organization of Educational Testing databank and reported tables of National Study Center of TIMSS and PIRLS. During these 5 years, results were shown that distances between high performance provinces compare to deprived provinces have been fixed about 4 to 5 standard deviation on standard z scale. Girls’ mean performance is lower than boys, and students who come from low performance provinces in international tests also are weak on national tests.

Network failure is one of the factors explaining the failure of innovation systems, which in comparison with other factors, has been less studied. In general, networks may fail in two ways: a) weak failure which means that they fail in the initiation phase, b) strong failure which means that they fail in keeping the network stable.System failure is one of the most important rationales for government intervention. However, it is not clear that how government can intervene, due to the lack of deep understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, the process of weak failure of engineered innovation networks has been analysed in detail by using process and exploratory-descriptive approach. The validity and applicability of the conceptual model, which is generated is tested in a single in-depth case study. The results are showing that networks become unstable because of two reasons: disappearance of trust among the members of the network, which leads to the members losing their incentives to be involved in the networks. These two factors, might be the results of main activities of network creation, which are member selection, structure design, formalization of relationships and network governance. The conceptual framework, which is developed in this article shows how these four main blocks could cause the network failure through hurting the trust and damaging the incentives of network members. In the last half of the paper, the failure mechanisms of innovation networks in the gas industry in Iran are explained through the application of proposed conceptual framework.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the pattern of collaboration between Iranian researchers in technology policy and management. In this study, as a Scientometrics, 175 Iranian associated papers from 17 Iranian and international journals have been reviewed, which led to drawing and calculation of a number of metrics for the coauthorship network. These metrics include density, clustering coefficient, the community structure in co-authorship networks as the macro indicators, and degrees as well as betweenness centrality index as the micro indicators. The results show that researchers in this area mostly tend to work in small groups and relationship between them are weak. Furthermore, the network can be considered as a scale-free network.

The Journal of Science and Technology Policy is the first and the most reliable scientific journals, which exclusively deals with science and technology policy and management issues in Iran.This journal has been regularly published since 2008. By reviewing articles published from first volume that appeared in 2008 to Vol (5)-Number (4)-2013, this article aims to provide an insight into the characteristics of the journal’s articles for researchers by investigating the knowledge flow including the main characters of journal through the contents of the published articles, examining the concepts involved, the issues they deal with, and the research methods they use Analysis of the flow of knowledge throughout the articles in the Journal indicates that the most participation in publication of the Journal articles is 80% by male authors.Moreover, only 16.5% of articles submitted to the journal are accepted for publication. The results of this study indicate that a majority of articles published in this journal are authored by the faculty members from the universities located in Tehran. Additionally, the results of thematic profile of the Journal indicate that most published articles are related to policy making / science and technology, the economy, and management of technology. Finally, many articles are descriptive, involve survey, and have practical applications.

Science and technology parks, which could result in accelerating growth and sustainable development of regions, play a key role in technological and scientific planning of the country. The modern science and technology planning theories emphasize the necessity of creating science and technology parks, which are based on the region’s natural resource endowments and technological capabilities.However, neither criteria nor principles in planning and designing these parks have been proposed. In this paper, given the unique features of Mazandaran, which has a natural resource based economy, we propose different principles for planning, designing, and implementing the science and technology parks. The principles of the planning and designing are codified in framework of the vision statement and full flow process of production in the parks by recognizing the concepts related to regional development, as well as identifying the regional advantages using the scientific methods and the regional comparative advantages. The results have shown that it is possible to provide different strategies of planning and designate for technology and science parks with respect to the social, economic, spatial, environmental, and temporal variables for a natural resource based economy. The strategies have been categorized in five areas: Economic, management, environmental-physical, social-cultural, and science and technology, and objective goals have been presented.

This paper aims to answer two basic questions pertaining to the interim accord between Iran and 5+1 countries First, can this accord be considered as a policy change in terms of Iranian nuclear technology policy?. Second, if the policy has changed, is the change caused by a policy oriented learning or by an adjustment in response to the environmental pressure? Relaying on the conceptualization of policy learning tripartite layers and analytical and reflective capacity of Susana Borras, the paper presents a theoretical model for policy making at the international level.Then, based on the methodology of data collection and sorting “rational choice narrativism”, it analyses two different historical points of 2003 and 2010 in the negotiation process of Iran with the 5+1 powers. It maintains that interim accord is the result of a twin policy and diplomacy oriented learning backed by the technological, analytical and reflective capacity building. Finally, the paper addresses the first question and concludes that the accord is a realignment of the Iranian nuclear strategy with the positive and negative heuristics of nuclear policy paradigm.