Popularity of patent commercialization policies: Iran as a case

Commercialization of technologies has attracted increasing attention over the past years due to its role in improving national competitiveness. Iran has not been an exception as the country's policy-makers have been actively engaged in crafting national policies to facilitate and promote commercialization of technologies. The popularity of the existing policies in this field, however, has not been properly researched. Our research, by following a survey study methodology, aims for the first time to address this gap. The study looks at popularity of governmental policies aimed at supporting commercialization of patented technologies in Iran, based on the careful study of 10 cases of successfully commercialized patented technologies in Iran. Our results indicate that the commercialization process of the studied patented technologies was very much affected by some company/technology-specific characteristics. The study shows that the two policy measures with the highest perceived popularity were the financial supports and the services offered by incubation centers. Our results also show that some of the existing supportive policy measures did not serve the intended purposes and some other measures need to be fine-tuned, as far as the studied cases are concerned, such as frequently held invention and innovation exhibitions and the government-supported media coverage.