Strategic Cooperation Between Industrial Companies and New Nanotechnology Businesses: Challenges and Approaches

Achieving power, excellence, and prosperity and wealth generation through utilization of new technologies such as nanotechnology is considered as one of Iran’s Meta-policies. This research was conducted to assess and analyze the cooperation of industrial companies and nanotechnology oriented businesses in a process of developing a new product. Its goal is to recognize major challenges and propose new approaches and solutions to overcome them. To do so, multiple long-term case studies method was implemented upon nanotechnology businesses from 2010 to 2017. To gather data for this article, semi-structured interviews were conducted with business managers and directors and company CEOs, also documents such as meeting agendas and agreements were analyzed to complement the interviews. To assess and analyze the date open and axial coding method was used. Some challenges include lack of knowledge between new businesses and industrial companies, existential discrepancy of academic knowledge of a new business and traditional ways of a company towards innovation of new products and services, prolonged process of developing a new product and its complexities and expenses, oversimplified view of new product development, risks and mistrusts, unfair financial benefits made by cooperation and unwillingness of industrial companies to progress towards new fields of technologies. Based on the mentioned challenges, related approaches and solutions were compiled to resolve them