Journal of Improvement management
Year:2018 | Volume:12 | Issue:3 (41)|Papers Count:6

Research and development (R&D) in business sector has a critical role in knowledgebased economy because it results in commercialization and wealth creation with a high probability. In Iran, the business expenditure on R&D is at a low level because the businesses have no incentive to research or there are some impediments for conducting R&D. Therefore, public intervention and preparing a policy mix to encourage R&D or eliminate its barriers is necessary. In this paper, multi-objective optimization is used to design a policy mix for enhancing the business expenditure on R&D in Iran considering the interactions between policy instruments. Using Genetic Algorithm in MATLAB R2016a Pareto optimums were calculated. The results of implementing the model on a pool of 32 policy instruments show that public procurement for innovative product, support for setting up and handling local consultative funds, tax credits for firms, support for new stock markets, public procurement for R&D, technology foresight, establishing reference laboratory, catalyst procurement for innovative product, and support for R&D consortia are the common instruments among the pareto optimum mixes which have to be considered by policy-makers.

One of the emerging theoretical subjects in the public administration discipline is the strategic public policy that results from the combination of theoretical literature in the two fields of "public policy" and "strategic management". This qualitative research is aimed to structural-interpretative policy analysis in national-level strategic issues. Considering the wide range of issues at the national level, decision making based on environmental issues in the country has been at the center of attention. The main question of the research is that what is the policy making levels in the national strategic issues with an emphasis on environmental issues? In order to answer this question, the combination of qualitative methods of thematic analysis and structuralinterpretation modeling has been used. Thematic analysis method through conducting interviews with experts and coding of written data eventually led to the emerging of 13 global themes. Finally, these themes are followed by the steps in structuralinterpretive modeling and paired relationship at six levels of problem solving, key actors, independent actors, government actors, citizen actions, global actors & National laws. These levels in fact represent policy making layers on national-level strategic issues focusing on environmental issues.

most important factor in maintaining and enhancing corporate performance. In order to have a comprehensive look at it, the concept of innovation ambidexterity has been developed and arranged focusing on exploitative innovation to maintain the competitiveness of existing products and with explorative innovation seeking new markets and products. According to literature, one of the most important processes to achieve this type of innovation and to overcome its challenges, especially in latecomer companies, is to enhance technological capability through learning mechanisms. This research has tried to propose appropriate policy programs to evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms in Iran steel industry. For this purpose, the integration of focus group and artificial neural network methods was used. The results, which were obtained using the Innovation Survey, showed that learning by doing is the most important learning mechanism that steel companies should pay attention to, as well as for exploitative innovation, learning by copying and design, and for exploratory learning, learning by research and interactions placed in the next rank. In the final stage, with the study of the global policies in other countries, 20 policy tools have been proposed and, with the focus group approach, seven programs have been identified as the most important tools that influences on technological learning.

Fast growth of level of technological capabilities of India and China has attracted the attention of policy makers and researchers in recent years. In addition to their domestic efforts, transfer of R&D activities of MNCs to these countries facilitates their rapid growth. In this context, this study intends to analyze the features foreign direct investment by multinational companies in R&D activities in India and China and its impact on their level of R&D activities through examination of international patents. For this purpose a new database has been created through cleaning and selecting of related data from USPTO database and joining the data to ORBIS dataset. After that the research hypothesis were analyzed by using a panel regression models. The result of the analysis confirms the important role of multinational companies in the development of technological capabilities in target countries, also the impact of competitive incentives for the development of innovative activities as well as evolutionary nature of multinational companies R&D activities. Based on the results of this study, the two main policies for the development of technological capabilities of the country are focusing on those MNCs that have market in Iran to transfer of their R&D activities, and second is to create a competition between the rival MNCs.

Considering the broad approach of innovation and the with respect to the innovation development depending on social, economic, institutional of a region as well as path dependency, one of the basic principles of regional innovation policy is the lack of compatibility of policies of successful regions in other regions due to different policy context and path dependence. In developing countries such as Iran, due to the wide variety of cultural and territorial conditions, the importance of this issue is increasing. On the other hand, considering the increasing attention of policy makers to the issues of regional innovation development, such as the development of strategic plan for the development of provincial science and technology, correct understanding of this concept, as well as a conceptual framework is needed to allow for appropriate policy analysis and suggestions. In this research, in addition to explaining the cognitive map of knowledge in this area, the conceptual framework (IDCR) as well as its components, is described.

Economic development and increasing wealth in the last century has resulted in a sevenfold growth in the per-capita raw material consumption, culminating in a global average of more than 10 tons in 2010. Environmental hazards and the threat of resource scarcity had been the driving force behind a multitude of researches on the consumption indicators and the flow analysis of materials. The export and import flow of materials to Iran is of strategic importance, since, on the one hand, the Iran’ s economy relies heavily on the export of raw materials, and, on the other hand, imports of some critical materials are subject to restrictions due to international sanctions. However, despite the strategic importance of the topic, neither a comprehensive national-level study on the material consumption patterns nor a comparison with other economies has been carried out. This paper aims to introduce several material flow indicators and briefly compare Iran, Brazil, India and Turkey from material consumption viewpoint. Investigating such indicators shows that beside Iran’ s considerable dependency on the exportation of raw materials, the country is importing significant amount of processed materials with high hidden flow input in the form of finished goods. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that in addition to the fact that the per-capita material footprint of Iran is nearly 50% higher than the global average, there is a still increasing trend, which necessitates the policymakers to devise better policies to optimize this trend.