Identifying the Components of the Optimal Organizational Culture of Commercialization of Research Results in Medical Science Universities

The development of universities in line with commercializing the research results in the first step needs to understand the effective components of organizational culture associated with academic research commercialization. This research aimed to identify the components of a desirable organizational culture to commercialize the research results in a medical sciences university.

This is an applied qualitative research design using  the approach of Glaser’s grounded theory. The target group included managers and faculty members at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. The data collection tool was semi-structured interviews with 14 respondents having experience in research commercialization or cooperation with private companies. The sample was selected using the snowball sampling approach. Then, the thematic analysis method was used to analyze data.

The research findings indicate that the total number of free codes extracted from the content of the interviews was 166, which after merging similar codes with each other, finally 43 codes were extracted and classified in 14 similar concepts and finally in 4 the main themes were categorized. These included components of needs assessment (social accountability), the components of idea production including (innovation, risk appetite, encouragement and reward and Mindset, the culture of idea conversion including (management support, university independence and autonomy, empowered structure, flexibility and strategy and commitment to goals) and the culture of communication include (communication models, interaction, teamwork, consulting services).

According to the results, a reason why research results are not commercialized much is the lack of adequate attention to creating culture by university policy-makers and decision-makers. Therefore, the results found by this research can be used in making policies in line with creating a culture to develop research commercialization.