Benchmarking of Innovation in the Iranian Banking Industry and Comparing it with MENA Region

This research pursues two major objectives. First, it is designed to review the literature on the subject of national competitiveness and national innovation systems and also to measure the seven factors of innovation in the Iranian banking industry and to compare it with the mean of MENA region's scores. Second, it means to offer some practical guidelines in order to enhance the level of Iran's innovation system efficiency. To gain these objectives, a questionnaire was prepared and sent to all private and public sector commercial banks of Iran. A total of 251 questionnaires were completed by managers and senior experts of 13 banks and the data from MENA region was collected through the WEF 2011-2012 competitive annual report.The hypothesis of this research confirms the higher scores of the Iranian banking industry compared to MENA region in respect of investment in R&D, industry-university co-operation and innovation capacity. Further, the analysis shows that the matching of the scores in these two variables can not be rejected: government support for highly technological products and innovation.