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This paper aims at identifying knowledge creation and diffusion challenges and explaining their causal relationship in renewable energy technologies in Iran.

By reviewing literature of renewable energy technologies development, key knowledge creation and diffusion challenges are extracted. Then, the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used to investigate the cause-effect relationships as well as the influence structure of aforementioned challenges in Iran.

The results indicate that lack of specialized higher education and research institutions (C4), limited international product development and technological cooperation with international pioneer firms (C8), insufficient international research interactions of institutions and academic research centres (C6), tight and temporary subsidies to domestic institutes (C13), limited and non-systematic government grants (C14), insufficient tax incentives with low impact on investment (C12), weak enforcement of intellectual property rights (C5), low number and relatively poor performance of NGOs and scientific and trade associations (C19) and the limited number of conferences, workshops, meetings and specialized journals (C15) are among the most instrumental challenges of knowledge creation and diffusion of renewable energy technologies development in Iran.

This paper identifies knowledge creation and diffusion challenges of renewable energy technologies development in Iran, which is applicable for other developing countries. It also analyses the interrelationship and causal effect between challenges which is a neglected issue in the literature and has beneficial theoretical and policy implications.