IDENTIFYING AND PRIORITIZING TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZA-TIONSUCCESS FACTORS USING FUZZY DELPHI AND ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS

Commercialization has been defined as a process by which a technology turns into a product acceptable in the market. Evidence from around the world shows that a small percentage of technologies have been successful in commercialization and most of them have not either resulted to a product or not reached to the market stage. This reflects the high complexity of the commercialization process. One of the main strategies to overcome problems of technology commercialization is to predict commercial success of the technology before having more investment in the next stages of the commercialization. In this regard, the purpose of this study was to identify factors affecting the success of commercialization of technology and determine the relative importance of these factors. Procedures can be developed based on the factors by which an investor could decide on capitalizing on the technology. In the first phase of this study, 38 components affecting the success of technology commercialization were extracted from the related literature. Then these components were classified in four dimensions: technical specifications, economic and financial specifications, market specifications and rules and certificates. In phase 2, to refine and verify the appropriateness of the factors extracted from related literature in accordance with technology commercialization actual context and conditions in Iran's firms and industries, fuzzy Delphi method was used with the survey of elected experts including 16 experienced professionals. As a result of the effective factors refinement, 32 components in 4 dimensions were specified. Then in phase 3, the relative importance of each of components and the dimensions affecting the commercialization success were determined having a survey from the same experts group and based on Analytic Network Process (ANP) method. According to the results of phase 3, market specifications were identified as the most important dimension of technology commercialization success factor and then dimensions: technical specifications, economic and financial specifications and rules and certificates.