Understanding Policy Entrepreneurship in Public Policy of Iran: A Phenomenographic Study

This study has been conducted to explore, understand and categorize policy entrepreneurship to achieve a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The research strategy adopted was phenomenography, and the data collection instrument was the semi-structured interview. To select the participants, the maximum variation and snowball sampling methods were used. The sample size was determined through the principle of theoretical saturation, resulting in 20 participants. Consequently, 20 people were interviewed who had hands-on experience with policy entrepreneurship and their contributions to policy innovations in 11 policies. The results indicated that there exist six descriptive categories in policy entrepreneurship, namely "creating innovative ideas", "making the innovative idea understood", "promoting the innovative idea", "persuading the institutional structure", "mainstreaming based on the innovative idea", and "monitoring the implementation of innovative policy". Based on the identified descriptive categories, the outcome space of policy entrepreneurship was formed, and its hierarchical model was presented.