فصلنامه توسعه کارآفرینی
سال پنجم شماره 3 (پیاپی 17، پاییز 1391)

The development of inter-organizational networks is considered as a strategic resource that can be shaped by managerial action. It can also lead to innovation improvement and can be considered as a method for survival and growth. This paper draws on the notion of network capital, which is defined as an investment in calculative relations through which firms gain access to other organizations’ knowledge to enhance expected economic returns. The main object of this research is to investigate the impact of network capital influence on a firm’s innovation capabilities. For this purpose the network capital with two dimensions of: industrial network capital and scientific network capital is investigated as an independent variable, and innovation capability with two dimensions (product innovation capability and process innovation capability) as a dependent variable additionally inter-organizational learning (knowledge sharing and knowledge acquisition) is entered as an interface in this association. The descriptive correlation method is used in this study and the measurement tool is a questionnaire which is tested between managers and experts from 158 high-tech companies in Tehran with random sampling. The path analysis with PLS software is used to analyse the data of this study. The results show that industrial network capital via inter-organizational learning has influenced the innovation capability. But scientific network capital has no influence on innovation capability.

Nowadays entrepreneurship orientation and entrepreneurial activities have become the focus of attention by many researchers because of fast-moving markets and competitive conditions. Corporate entrepreneurship is an imperative for the improvement of organizational performance and organizational growth. The aim of this research is to investigate the effects of corporate entrepreneurship activities on performance of public and private organizations.A survey questionnaire was designed to collect data from 70 respondents (top and middle managers) of different firms. The reliability tests were conducted. The internal consistency of the total score was 0.96. Various statistical tests including correlation coefficient, regression analysis, one way ANOVA, t-test and the like have been conducted to test the six hypotheses. The result indicates that, apart from “risk taking” and “customer satisfaction”, there is a positive correlation among research variables and as to the entrepreneurship and performance there is a meaningful difference between public and private firms. Also only 7.33 percent of organizational performance could be defined by the corporate entrepreneurship.

In today's turbulent economic situations, taking entrepreneurial risk is one of the most important factors for companies to place themselves on track towards success. Entrepreneurship education is per se a very critical factor. This paper aims to investigate the characteristics of an entrepreneurial university. The study is descriptive based on application practice. We used a sample based on t-test and Pearson correlation test in order to analyze the data. The sample consists of Tarbiat Modares University's faculty members and employees. Thirteen hypotheses have been evaluated in the current study. Tarbiat Modares University has been chosen as one of the pioneering universities in Iran. The results show that Tarbiat Modares University possesses entrepreneurial culture, continuous interaction with the environment, common vision, a foresight strategy and required, human resources but it lacks an entrepreneurial structure and financial independence. The research findings reveal that the university should focus on human resources, funding the entrepreneurial activities, decentralizing the structure, reducing complexity of activities, and supporting entrepreneurial activities in order to improve its entrepreneurial characteristics.

This descriptive-survey study is aimed to investigate entrepreneurial education needs of agricultural master students of the University of Zanjan. The population of this research constitutes all master students in Agricultural Faculty of Zanjan University (N=398). According to Krejcie and Morgan table, a sample size of 180 was selected using a stratified random sampling method (n=195). A questionnaire was used to collect the data. The content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of faculty members at the Universities of Tehran and Zanjan. A pilot study was conducted to establish the reliability of research instrument. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the main scale of questionnaire was equal to 0.82. The results showed that the importance of all six factors mentioned in the research conceptual model was verified based on the field data (appropriate fitness of the model) and these factors including entrepreneurial knowledge, general skills, rules and regulations, occupational competencies, developing business plans and managerial skills along with an explanation of 66.1 percent of total variances, have gained the priorities from first to six in identifying and determining the entrepreneurial education needs of the agricultural master students.

It is almost accepted that entrepreneurship is an issue which can be learned and in recent times the myth of the people who are born as entrepreneurs has faded. The useful results of entrepreneurship are known to people in the society as a whole. Rapid changes in communication and other technologies affecting entrepreneurship education are not an exception to this rule. E-Learning enables people to review entrepreneurship education they need without temporal and spatial constraints. But the success of E-Learning entrepreneurship is the function of factors that motivate us to explore more areas in this paper. In this study, by using a questionnaire as a data gathering tool, 100 teachers and experts were involved in E-Learning from the universities located in the City of Tehran. The results of factor analysis by SPSS show that there are four groups of factors that affect the success of E-learning entrepreneurship. These factors are strategic management processes of E-learning, technical leadership, the contents of courses and student related factors. Among these factors, the strategic management processe of E-learning shows the highest importance based on Spearman’s correlation technique and a relatively strong correlation among all factors is also obtained.

Entrepreneurship is considered as a main key driver in any nation’s economic growth. Based on the recent literature review, entrepreneurial intention is suggested to be a predictor of an individual’s future entrepreneurial behaviour. The investigation of factors that influence students’ entrepreneurial intentions and drive them to start a new business has been a focus of attention by many researches. The present study explores the effects of contextual and cultural factors on the development of students’ entrepreneurial intentions. The primary data were collected from a sample of 183 students enrolled at four agricultural coleges in Iran. The structuural Equation Modeling was used to analyze the data. The study found positive effects of perceived relational and university support on entrepreneurial students’ intentions. However, the results illustrated that individualism, collectivism, support and perceived environmental barriers did not have any direct influence on entrepreneurial intentions.

Lack of knowledge about the variables explaining economic growth as well as a correct model of economic growth will result in the uncertainty of model. In this study, the factors affecting Iran's economic growth have been investigated focusing on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship in terms of model uncertainty. For this purpose the Bayesian Averaging Method has been used due to its suitable features to hypothesize the uncertainty of model. The important variables were specified using the estimate of 43 million regressions and Bayesian Averaging of coefficients. The findings indicate that inflation, labor force, government investment, entrepreneurship, exports, government health expenses, investment in oil and gas industry and foreign direct investment have significant effects on economic growth. The obtained results show that entrepreneurship has accordingly a significant effect on economic growth alongside 27 other variables which will require special attention for promoting entrepreneurial activities towards economic growth.

This research pursues two major objectives. First, it is designed to review the literature on the subject of national competitiveness and national innovation systems and also to measure the seven factors of innovation in the Iranian banking industry and to compare it with the mean of MENA region's scores. Second, it means to offer some practical guidelines in order to enhance the level of Iran's innovation system efficiency. To gain these objectives, a questionnaire was prepared and sent to all private and public sector commercial banks of Iran. A total of 251 questionnaires were completed by managers and senior experts of 13 banks and the data from MENA region was collected through the WEF 2011-2012 competitive annual report.The hypothesis of this research confirms the higher scores of the Iranian banking industry compared to MENA region in respect of investment in R&D, industry-university co-operation and innovation capacity. Further, the analysis shows that the matching of the scores in these two variables can not be rejected: government support for highly technological products and innovation.

The aim of the present study is to identify and prioritize the growth strategies used by 74 active SMEs in "Gaze Boldaji" industrial cluster. In the first phase of the research, we used unstructured interviews with 10 managers of cluster and businesses in order to identify the strategies. In the second phase, we designed questionnaires based on the interviews to prioritize the strategies and were distributed among 58 of business executives. We used the available sampling to choose cluster managers, stratified random sampling to choose business managers and random sampling to distribute the questionnaires.For the analysis of the texts of interviews, the content method was used and for the analysis of the data derived from the questionnaires a single sample t-test and Friedman methods were used. The results showed that the strategy of "increasing sales", "development of public relations and information about products", "selling products in new areas" and "improvement of existing products," were the most frequently used strategies and the "focused strategy" was introduced as the first priority among the growth strategies in this cluster.

This paper is aimed to distinguish the obstacles to the home video network and to propose the operational solutions to them. In order to study the barriers, six dimensions have been considered based on the distribution literature. These dimensions are channel distribution, organizational processes, consumers, management, product and finance. With respect to the importance and position of barriers to distribution of movies in HVN, an explorative method was used to collect data from 114 experts sampled from entertainment companies. The solutions have been obtained through XTRIZ method in a focus group. The result indicates that the main obstacles are: (1) sales of products with lower prices to retail outlets (2), visitors with two or three jobs in different distribution companies and (3). the rejected movies from super-markets instead of payments for new movies.