Analysis of Iran's Innovation Ecosystem from Policy Making to Practice: An Approach Based on Thematic Analysis

During the last decade, innovation ecosystems have become essential not only for businesses correspondingly for governments aimed at national economic and social development. For this purpose, the current research has analyzed the country's innovation ecosystem based on the views of a policy maker during the eight-year period of activity in this field. According to this goal, qualitative research design and thematic analysis method were used. A number of 235 videos containing their talks in meetings and interviews about the country's innovation ecosystem were analyzed. The findings of the research include eight main themes (influence on society, the role of the government, the foundation of knowledge-based economy, investment, government obstacles, communication and interactions, the mechanism of change and the spread of innovation) and 23 sub-themes and 103 open codes. Also, due to the importance of High-level state documents in drawing the desired future and determining goals, strategies and innovative measures, the collected themes were adapted to 12 High-level state documents and the result indicated their compatibility with these documents. Based on the analysis of findings, three main issues can be concluded. First of all, the government, by expanding the scope of its activity in the ecosystem of innovation, simultaneously fuels the increase of extensive bureaucracy in it, which shows the paradox between the role of facilitating and removing the bureaucratic obstacles of the government. Second, despite the view of connecting knowledge to the country's economy, its macro effects in indicators such as productivity growth rate and solving society's problems are still weak. Thirdly, due to the small amount of domestic investment (public and private sector), the entry of foreign investment can accelerate the development of the innovation ecosystem.