فصلنامه بهبود مدیریت
پیاپی 48 (تابستان 1399)

With the advent of the Internet and the IT revolution in recent decades, startups can create new business opportunities around innovative ideas. As startups are tied to technology, they have become a driving force in the economies of nations. However, their high failure rates indicate that failure is part of the startup ecosystem and they are inevitable, and because of the limited resources and time of the startups, a failed project can get them out of business. According to recent research, most startups are more vulnerable in the early stages of their life-cycle, and investigating the factors affecting the resilience of startups throughout the life-cycle of innovation can reduce their failure rates. By conducting a multi-case study of PayPing, Achareh, Ubaar, and Keshmoon that have successfully played out their startup life cycle, analyzing the content of the data collected through interviews by Atlas.ti, the startup resilience model in the ICT industry was extracted. The findings show that the startup resilience model has three dimensions of challenge (with product, market, team, financial and legal challenge components), action (with pivot, value proposition, lean customer creation, platform building, internal action and external action), and progressing factor (with team key capabilities and startup ecosystem).

In today's global economy, innovation plays an important role in economic growth and has been supported as a policy priority in many countries through national strategies and large budgets. One of the prerequisites for setting the right innovation policy is to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation process, which has been considered in various approaches so far. One of the new and important approaches is the innovation system approach. Most of the studies that have been done to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation system have looked at innovation as a black box and have only considered limited input-output indicators. In the present study, focusing on the conditions of developing countries, a complete set of indicators, taking into account the two sub-processes of creation and commercialization of knowledge, has been the basis of study. Based on expert opinions, 15 indicators were selected to evaluate the efficiency of the innovation system. The results of the efficiency evaluation by the DEA method indicate that the Iranian innovation system is ineffective in the subprocesses of knowledge creation and commercialization. To improve the current situation, policy recommnedations have been made, and the most important of which are the development and improvement of guaranteed procurement of technology programs, advice on identifying international markets for knowledge-based firms, and support for the implementation of fund of fund programs.

The defense sector is one of the most strategic and important sectors in our country. The ‎performance of the defense sector is tied to the supply chain performance to a large extent. ‎In the military supply chain, the ability to protect the chain against unexpected events and ‎maintain the continuity of network operations at a desirable level is very significant; in some ‎ways, it can be said that the proper resilience of the defense supply chain is one of the ‎essential features it is considered for that. Hence, the aim of the research is to provide a ‎resilient defense supply chain model. In this research, after reviewing theoretical ‎fundamentals of research and opinion polls by experts, nine dimensions and related ‎components were identified as resilient defensive supply chain enablers. In the next step, ‎applying Structural-Interpretative Modeling (ISM), the relationship between Enablers of the ‎resilient defense supply chain was determined and by leveling these dimensions, the research ‎model was drawn. The results of the research showed that the two dimensions of "learning" ‎and "collaboration" and then "risk management culture" and "contingency planning" have ‎the highest priority in achieving a resilient defense supply chain‏.‏

The conception of technology parks is employed with different meanings in scientific and practical categories, but the primary purpose of this is to create an Intermediate loop among the government, the Business and the university in order to act as a catalyst guiding the innovation. In this process, regarding internal and external effective factors, technology parks experienced various structural changes. One of these changes was change in innovation models, which parks need their assistance to perform their mission. Because of this, stakeholders, software and hardware infrastructures and also human factors changed. The goal of this study is to extract the maturity pattern of technology parks with centrality of innovation historical evolution. Determination of Iran’s parks position in maturity pattern of technology parks and their evolution extent after years of activity is another goal of this study. In this paper, in the beginning, the historical evolution of parks are evaluated. Then, the maturity pattern of technology parks are studied regarding sevenfold innovation generations as parks’ innovation viewpoint, which resulted to five generations of technology parks. Based on this, during interviews with managers and experts of technology parks, Iran parks’ position in maturity pattern of technology parks was determined which can be classified among first and second generations.

Regarding a significant shift in the project delivery methods, principal contractors of megaprojects may be responsible not only for engineering, procurement, and construction but also for financing the projects through different methods. This model of project delivery brings benefits in terms of the active participation of the private sector in the project financing process. However, the implementation of this delivery model would be quite challenging for principal contractors that need to consider both operational and financial matters in the delivery of a megaproject. The private sector should be involved in financing large-scale projects but, in the meantime, proper support of the government is needed. Although several studies have been conducted to explore aspects of EPCF projects, further research is needed to uncover problems associated with the financing of these projects. Hence, this study attempts to identify and prioritize the challenges of financing EPCF megaprojects. The main challenges were identified from the perspective of project management experts. After consolidating outcomes using the grounded theory approach, a group TOPSIS method was adopted to validate the findings and prioritize the challenges. This study contributes to a better understanding of the challenges associate with financing EPCF projects and encourages both practitioners and researchers to elaborate on permanent solutions to such problems.

Limited researches have been presented on Blockchain technology as new concepts in ownership dissemination. The focus of previous researches have been on the technical specifications of the implementation and operation of this technology. Therefore, this study has tried to examine the required changes in the business model of organizations. Challenge of implementing Blockchain not only requires technical feasibility but also needs collaboration among businesses to re-engineering processes. In this study, a cooperative business model based on Blockchain is presented and the challenges of implementing this technology in the Iran's mobile operator are discussed as an example of developing country. Canvas is the base model in this research and conducting an in-depth review of the literature has showed that isolated model like canvas could not be mapped for cooperative technologies like Blockchain. Qualitative content analysis methodology is used to codify the experts’ opinions in the two fields of business model design and Blockchain technology industrialization and customization of model in mobile operator industry is verified by Fuzzy Delphi method. In the cooperation-oriented approach of the new business model, mobile operator can design and provide new value-added services by sharing their information resources and decrease the fraud.