Designing the Measurement Model of Components of Nanotechnology Commercialization in the Iranian Agricultural Sector

Commercialization as one of the key steps in the process of innovation development transfers the findings of research and patents to market. More importantly, several factors and components influence the process of commercialization development which are necessary to be studied and identified. Considering the importance of the subject, this descriptive- survey study is aimed to investigate components of nanotechnology commercialization in the Iranian agricultural sector. The statistical population of the study contained all the researchers who were working in 22 National Agricultural Research Institutions/ Centers (N= 275). According to the Krejcie and Morgan table, a sample size of 160 was selected using a random sampling technique (n=160). A questionnaire designed by researcher was used to collect the data. The content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of faculty members at the University of Tehran. A pilot study was conducted to establish the reliability of the research instrument. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the main scales of the questionnaire were at the appropriate level. The collected data were analyzed using the SPSSWin16 and LISREL8.5 software. The results showed that the importance of all six factors mentioned in the research conceptual model was verified based on the field data (good fitness of the model) and the factors including: political, financial, infrastructural, legislative, informative and educational, explaining 67.89 percent of total variances, have gained the priority from first to five in identifying and determining the components of nanotechnology commercialization in the Iranian agricultural sector.