In today’s competitive world, achieving competitive advantages has become an undeniable necessity, whether in the area of small enterprises or the national macro field. As a developing country, Iran is no exception and has understood the necessity of attaining competitiveness at the national and global levels. Without a doubt, one of the essential factors for achieving this important goal is creating the economic added value resulting from the innovation and commercialization of technology. Therefore, one of the strategic policies and essential priorities of the Vice-Presidency for science and technology affairs in the 11th government is supporting innovation and commercializing technology to increase and properly re-create the knowledge-based production share of the country. Meanwhile, increasing the share of knowledge-based production is a serious socioeconomic challenge. In Iran’s economy, where significant dependence on oil revenues has been experienced for many years, distancing our economy from such a trend requires decisions beyond the field of science and technology, meaning the macroeconomics, industry, and management fields of the country.

 

Experiences from the sanctions showed that technology creation and product development were more successfully carried out whenever there was a serious need for innovation and technology. In this regard, the Vice-Presidency for science and technology affairs has paid special attention to the area of innovation and technology demand in addition to supply, for which strong foundations have been created to realize knowledge-based economy.

 

A clear indication of the necessity of this change can be found in the current status of the country's assets and capabilities. Over the last years, science production indexes (e.g., number of scientific publications) have had a significant growth in many fields. Meanwhile, technology development indexes (e.g., patent registration or number of products presented to the market) are not that great. The weakness in the final stages of the process of turning ideas into wealth and failure to commercialize research results and innovation into technological services and products and presenting products to the market have led to lack of benefiting from innovation and technology benefits from one hand and lack of ability of researchers, innovators and technologies to properly exploit their achievements from the other hand. Therefore, they have failed to be allocated a considerable share of national economy.

 

In this regard, this area has been considered by the Vice-Presidency for science and technology affairs, which has aimed to improve the technology level and internal technological capabilities, increase the country's competitive ability in the domestic market and export of knowledge-based goods, create sustainable employment and building trust in domestic applied research through various mechanisms  (e.g., holding exhibitions, technomart, and technological events), grant commercialization award to universities and research centers, support the development of technology innovation and accelerators and implement major national plans.

 

 

 

The technology commercialization and innovation headquarter has been established to lay the foundation for development and support of the market for knowledge-based products, development of innovation ecosystem and support of the development and implementation of national macro projects. With regard to its multi-sectoral position, the Vice-Presidency for science and technology affairs is responsible for identifying and helping the exploitation of special opportunities to grow and develop new technologies in the country, carry out macro policy-making for commercialization and innovation with the help of other organizations, plan, organize, manage and monitor the commercialization and innovation activities of the country and establish the of science-industry-market association in national innovation system.