Evaluating Effectiveness of Governmental Supports from Knowledge-Based Biotechnology Firms

With the approval of the law for supporting knowledge-based firms in 2010, a new wave in
Iran’s science, technology and innovation system began with a focus on the knowledge based
economy and innovation-based. Currently, there are more than 4,000 knowledge-based firms
in Iran that nearly 5% of them are active in biotechnology. The aim of the present study is to
design an empirical model of the relationship between financial and tax incentives of this law on
some of the performance indicators of biotechnology knowledge-based firms. For this purpose,
after analyzing the content of related documents and designing the study model, for evaluating
the direct and interacting effects between policy tools, identifying the important empirical
factors and their level, “23 factorial design” was used. Study target community includes 113
manufacturing knowledge-based firms in the field of biotechnology. The findings of this
study on input additionality indicators show the positive effect of the threefold interaction of
factors on the R&D expenditure and the positive effects of commercialization financing and
technology financing and their interactions on R&D employee. In the present study, there was
no relationship between the effectiveness of policy tools on output additionality indicators.