Identifying and Weighting Open R&D Challenges in the Field of Emerging Technologies (Case study: Nanotechnology)

Emerging technologies are drivers for scientific and economic leaps. Due to their characteristics, their development requires cooperation with domestic and foreign research networks. One of the appropriate strategies for acquiring this type of technology is to use an open R&D approach. Identifying executive and management challenges beforehand is a requirement for the effectiveness and efficiency of this method. This paper aims to identify and weigh the challenges of an open R&D approach for the acquisition of emerging nanotechnology technology in Iran. After performing library studies, 29 challenges were extracted from internal and external sources. During the three staged surveys conducted by the fuzzy Delphi method, 25 challenges were selected in three categories (internal, external, integrated) and by weighed Shannon entropy method, a comparison study was made with six related studies. Finally, some strategies were advised. Findings indicate the importance of the challenge of "lack of protection of intellectual property" and the identification of four challenges of "maintaining a balance between R&D cooperation, internal and external, inability to control, lack of convergence of research, strategy inconsistency" that less research has addressed.