فصلنامه رشد فناوری
پیاپی 38 (بهار 1393)

Today, there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift from capital economy to knowledge-based economy to achieve sustainable development. The Science and Technology Corridor (STC) as an infrastructure for the development of knowledge-based economy aims to provide an attractive environment for investors, firms, corporations, and knowledge-based institutions and citizens by creating incentives for the industry to move towards new technologies and high value-added businesses. These corridors are actually special areas which include various components such as universities and higher education institutions, research centers, science and technology parks, knowledge-based in different industries. Their main purpose is to form a technology cluster. In addition, high value-added services are provided by these corridors. The outputs of these areas will facilitate the process of innovation and convert knowledge into wealth. This paper elaborates the properties of knowledge-based economy, defining STCs and explaining Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) as a successful experience. Malaysia's MSC is a cluster of ICT companies, and its main purpose is to encourage innovation and development of new technologies by the companies. In addition, the potential of the Isfahan as a first experience in Iran for STC establishment and its capability to change the geography and the local economy of the Isfahan from an industrial region into a knowledge-based region will be explained.

In Incubators of Science and Technology parks (STPs) manifold services are presented to develop tenant institutes. There are always a few tenants institutes perform distinctively and distinguished outcomes from others, despite of similarities of services to all of them. In this research, Positive Deviants (Problem Solving Technique identified in 1990) has been used to achieve the main factors of prosperity of such bold tenants and try in recognizing solutions for distributing them to others. This research has been done in Information and Communication Incubators of Yazd Science and Technology Park (YSTP). By four essential and methodological phases, “Define”, “Determine”, “Discover”, and “Design”, Implemented solutions and behaviors of prosperous tenants to overcome difficulties and enhance developments have been recognized. Besides, using the technique “House of Quality” some findings and solutions (by changes in key processes of YSTP) is suggested to generalize the research results to other tenants. Finally, some recommendations have been added to this study.

In The world's most developed countries, policies to support small and medium enterprises in order to increase growth, income generating employment and reducing poverty in the forefront of economic or social - are governments’ important priorities. Essential characteristics of small and medium enterprises, including flexibility in face with market changes, rapid attainment of the activities, initiatives and high motivation of staffs and limited initial capital requirements, have caused growth, innovation and economic dynamism in transition economies of the firms. This study aimed to identify small and medium sized manufacturing firms with rapid growth, and determine their contribution to the Malaysian economy. Malaysia's Vision 2020 has planned development policies through enterprise and small business enhancement. These companies play a significant role in the economic breakthrough of Malaysia. These companies have allocated 93.8% of the operating companies in the industrial sector, 27.3% of total manufacturing production, 25.8% of value-added in production, 27.6% of the fixed assets and 38.9% of the employees of the country. Evidences suggest that these companies have major contribution in national economic development in Malaysia.

Business intelligence is a set of theories, methodologies, architectures and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. With today’s BI tools, business folks can jump in and start analyzing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. Evaluating the effectiveness of Business intelligence system is vital to our understanding of the value and efficacy of management actions and investments. This research aims to explain and clarify the inter-relationships and the interaction effects among business intelligence systems maturity and other relevant factors such as information access quality and information content quality. We developed a model of business intelligence systems maturity based on the outcomes of previous researches and semi-structured interviews with experts in information technology. To examine the model a descriptive survey was applied. The survey sample population consisted of 100 randomly taken managers and IT managers who apply Business intelligence system in their companies, according to a cluster random sampling skim. An important part of the results revealed business intelligence systems maturity relates directly with information quality and use of information in business process.

Most of the nation’s economic power to dominate the regional and trans-regional markets depends on the knowledge and technology and its application in creating various products consistent with the current worldwide demand. The use of technology in production and export leads to increased competiveness strength and enhanced worldwide market share. This study investigates the effect of innovation on high technology exports of Iran in comparison to the selected countries mentioned in the vision plan during 2007-2012 in order to provide policy recommendations to achieve the vision plan goals and seriously addressing the economic sanctions. The results indicate a positive relationship between innovation and high technology exports in studied countries. Among the studied countries, the worst and the best performance on high technology exports respectively are Qatar and Turkey. Iran ranked second in the region on high technology exports and in the couple of innovation indicators (The number of patents and scientific and technical papers) but for the other indicators of innovation, the situation is not desirable. Despite the presence of young and graduated generation and the development of higher education, due to inconsistencies between macroeconomic policies and research and innovation policies and also the lack of demand-driven innovative activities, still Iran has not reached the top position in exports of high technology in the region. So to seriously deal with economic sanctions and to achieve Vision′s goals, it is necessary to adopt appropriate macroeconomic policies in order to create demand for the development of innovation activities.

Technology Commercialization plays an important role in improving society welfare. Moreover, to be eligible, a company must meet all criteria and features in supplying a new product to the market. A technology should have diverse unique features in order to attract customers attention and be a great market potential for its product or service. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of technology features on technology commercialization. According to the innovation diffusion theory, technology features conclude innovation, publicity, simplicity and consistency. The questionnaires were distributed among 130 SME’s of Guilan Science and Technology Park. Among the 130 questionnaires, 97 questionnaires were answered; therefore the final evaluation has been accomplished based on 97 questionnaires. In addition to the confirmation of extracted model, research results showed that each of the relevant variables directly affects the technology commercialization. According to the results, the most effective factors on technology commercialization relate to the variables such as consistency and simplicity while publicity and innovation are on the next level of importance. The results also prove the effect of technology features on market potential and the effect of on market potential on commercialization. In conclusion, there is a direct, positive and significant relation between technology attributes and market potential, but the impact of technology features on commercialization occurs indirectly as an intermediate structure.

Assessment of knowledge management (KM) helps knowledge-based organizations to establish their KM process effectively. So, it is necessary to define some measures to evaluate KM process of these organizations. These indicators can measure efficiency and effectiveness of KM process in knowledge-based organizations. The purpose of this paper development of an assessment model for KM process in knowledge-based companies. In this study, a model was developed based on four enabler factors of knowledge management including “human resources, information technology, education and culture”, and four KM sub-processes including “creating, storing, sharing and applying knowledge”. The statistical sample consists of staff and faculty members of University of Qom in which the developed model is evaluated as a case study. A descriptive-survey research method was conducted in this study based on a questionnaire. The results indicate that University of Qom has not focused enough on KM process. Also, the results of the Fridman test show that none of the studied factors and processes is in a desirable condition in the university; it has been pay less attention to “Organizational culture” and “knowledge creating”, whereas “education” and “knowledge applying” have received more attention.