The sectoral model for integration and alignment of technologies

Iran's petroleum industry is facing challenges including maturity of hydrocarbon fields, growing population of the nation that demands additional revenues from petroleum exports, and international economic sanctions that have limited access to technology sources. Restrictions from international technology providers have led managers of the industry enterprises to try to develop their needed technologies inside the country. The Ministry of Petroleum has supervised this and as a result, a technology planning systems has been developed and implemented since 2009. In this paper, an overview of the Iranian petroleum industry is provided from a technology planning perspective. The focus has been on the events and the behavior of the system after the implementation of the new technology planning system, which coincides with the period of the intensification of international sanctions against Iran. Results of the study, and a comparison between features of the technology planning systems before and after 2009 show that while the new approach has promoted the planning system from several aspects it still suffers lack of attention to two key elements of a planning system i.e. integration and alignment between different levels of planning. As a result of recognizing the necessity of an evolutionary model at the industry level to address these two factors and by reviewing experiences from several countries, a general model is proposed. The proposed model brings the two issues of integration and alignment in technology planning systems into consideration with special attention to key factors such as