Identification of Existing Gaps to Complete Technological Catch-up in the Iranian biopharmaceutical industry: A Comparative Study Approach

Technological catch-up is a very complex and time-consuming process that requires all kinds of capabilities to be acquired by the latercomer firms in order to successfully complete the various stages. This process is influenced by various factors that determine its failure or success. Considering the factors affecting the successful and unsuccessful cases in the catch-up process can gain a good insight for companies and countries that want to go through this path successfully. In this regard, in the present study, with the help of a systematic review of the literature, a framework of factors affecting the success of pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and knowledge-based industries was extracted in order to make a comparative comparison with the catch-up situation in the biopharmaceutical industry in Iran. Quantitative support of foreign and domestic studies of each of the factors by Shannon entropy method is calculated and compared with each other to identify gaps in the catch-up of the Iranian biopharmaceutical industry. The obtained results show that there is a high similarity between domestic and international articles in terms of entropy in terms of institutional environment, capability building, and technological regimes. It is also necessary to improve the unfavorable position of the domestic industry in the factors of the market catch-up, organizational issues and the catch-up strategies with the help of the proposed solutions.