Impact of Absorptive Capacity on technology competitiveness enhancement: Key to the success of public organization (with emphasis on Iran)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between absorptive capacity & competitiveness of developing and emerging countries. After holistic review of literature, absorptive capacity constructive elements and measuring variables of it, was identified and clarified. Then, three main frameworks of measuring national competitiveness and their relative indexed was extracted. Because of lack of Iran’s data in 2 of 3 studied frameworks, WEF framework (2013-2014 report) was selected as a base of this research. After interviewing with 3 outstanding economists, 11 extracted indexes of absorptive capacity from literature was selected. In the next phase, 9 developing and emerging countries like Iran, that are exemplary for their status and are choices for comparison. Quantitive analysis results verified the positive relationship between total absorptive capacity & competitiveness in ten studied countries. With more detail, absorptive capacity has a positive and significant relationship & innovation and efficiency elements of competitiveness. But there is no relationship with basic requirement elements of competitiveness. Based on the results, developing countries like Iran, must consider absorptive capacity as an essential component to enhance competitiveness and must take required actions to meet this objective.