Comparing the efficiency of Iran's national innovation system with selected countries with emphasis on opening the black box of innovation and a historical look at the situation of the National Innovation System in Iran

In today's global economy, innovation plays an important role in economic growth and has been supported as a policy priority in many countries through national strategies and large budgets. One of the prerequisites for setting the right innovation policy is to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation process, which has been considered in various approaches so far. One of the new and important approaches is the innovation system approach. Most of the studies that have been done to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation system have looked at innovation as a black box and have only considered limited input-output indicators. In the present study, focusing on the conditions of developing countries, a complete set of indicators, taking into account the two sub-processes of creation and commercialization of knowledge, has been the basis of study. Based on expert opinions, 15 indicators were selected to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation system. The results of the efficiency evaluation by the DEA method indicate that the Iranian innovation system is ineffective in the subprocesses of knowledge creation and commercialization. To improve the current situation, policy recommnedations have been made, and the most important of which are the development and improvement of guaranteed procurement of technology programs, advice on identifying international markets for knowledge-based firms, and support for the implementation of fund of fund programs.