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Acute shortage of potable water and energy supplies is expected to raise in developing countries in the near future. One solid way to address these issues is to exploit renewable energy resources efficiently. Hence, this study aims to investigate wind and solar energy use in the coastal areas of southern Iran for renewable-powered seawater desalination and hydrogen production systems.

To accomplish the aforementioned purpose, five areas most prone to the problems in Iran, namely, Mahshahr, Jask and Chabahar ports and Kish and Hormoz islands were scrutinized. To ascertain the amount of wind and solar energy available in the areas, Weibull distribution function, Angstrom–Prescott equation and HOMER software were used.

The findings indicated that wind energy density in Kish was 2,014.86 (kWh/m².yr) and solar energy density in Jask equaled to 2,255.7 (kWh/m².yr) which possessed the best conditions among the areas under study. Moreover, three commercial wind turbines and three photovoltaic systems were examined for supplying energy needed by the water desalination and hydrogen production systems. The results showed that application of wind turbines with rated power of 660, 750 and 900 kWh in Kish could result in desalting 934,145, 1,263,339 and 2,000,450 (m³/yr) of seawater or producing 14,719, 20,896 and 31,521 (kg/yr) of hydrogen, respectively. Additionally, use of photovoltaic systems with efficiency of %14.4, %17.01 and %21.16 in Jask could desalinate 287, 444 and 464 (m³/yr) of seawater or generate 4.5, 7 and 7.3 (kg/yr) of hydrogen, respectively.

Compared to the huge extent of water shortage and environmental pollution, there has not been conducted enough studies to obtain broader view regarding use of renewable energies to solve these issues in Iran. Therefore, this study tries to close this gap and to give other developing nations the idea of water desalination and hydrogen production via renewable energies.

Running advertising campaigns and attracting the traffic, as well as collecting information from users who have entered the website once, provides the conditions to perform retargeting campaigns and consequently increases website visit rates and sales. The purpose of this research is to design a roadmap of retargeting campaign for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as to compare normal and retargeting advertising campaigns in order to confirm the effectiveness of retargeting campaigns.

A single-case-study strategy was adopted by choosing advertising Company-X to design the roadmap of retargeting campaigns and evaluate its effectiveness. Using a purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 experts of advertising Company-X. Furthermore, the documents and reports available in the company were also analyzed. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the interviews and documents. Next, a one-way ANOVA test and a two-sample t-test were used to measure the effectiveness of retargeting campaigns of the Company-X compared to normal campaigns with secondary data of 22 SMEs for a six-month period.

The qualitative phase led to the presentation of a roadmap for the retargeting campaigns in three stages: preparation, process and implementation. The results of the quantitative phase revealed that the ratio of clicks to impressions (click-through rate) and the ratio of successful purchase tags to clicks (conversion rate) are much higher in the retargeting product campaign. Therefore, the performance of selected SMEs as an example in the product retargeting campaign was better than that of the non-retargeting campaigns. Also, the ratio of cost to the successful purchase tag was higher for the product retargeting campaigns.

This study contributes to the literature of retargeting. First, this study provides SMEs with a successful roadmap for retargeting campaigns. Second, this research reveals the effectiveness and mechanism of retargeting for SMEs.

Science and technology parks (STPs) have a limited capacity, which can create challenging conditions for applicants. This makes the location selection a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem to find and apply for the most appropriate STP with the highest accordance with the startup's requirements. This research aims to select the most appropriate STP to locate an international entrepreneurial pharmaceutical startup under uncertainty. Since drugs are generally produced domestically in developing countries such as Iran, the access of pharmaceutical startups to the resources provided by STPs can lead to overcoming competitors and improving the country's health system.

In this research, the factors or attributes effective on startup location were extracted through a two-round Delphi method, which was performed among 15 experts within three groups. Subsequently, the determining factors were used to select the location of a pharmaceutical startup among possible STPs. In this regard, decision-makers were allowed to use different types of numbers to transfer their opinion. Afterward, the heterogeneous weighted aggregated sum product assessment (HWASPAS) method was applied to calculate the score of each alternative and rank them to place the studied startup successfully.

The results indicated that Tehran STP stands in the first place; however, if the decision was made based on single criterion like cost, some other STPs could be preferable, and many managers would lose this choice. Furthermore, the results of the proposed method were close to other popular heterogeneous MCDM approaches.

A heterogeneous WASPAS is developed in this article for the first time to enable international entrepreneurs to imply their opinion with various values and linguistic variables to reduce the emphasis on accurate data in an uncertain environment.

Due to the political, economic and infrastructure barriers and risks that international entrepreneurs (IEs) face when researching an emerging economy's agrifood sector, this research aims to identify the major barriers, analyse their relationships, quantify their importance, classify and rank them. Thus, the IEs will gain a better understanding and vision of their decision-making processes in this era.

To do this, the authors first created a list of barriers to entry for IEs into Iran's rising economy's agrifood industry. Following that, a multi-layer decision-making approach was developed and implemented to accomplish the research objectives. The first stage utilized a hybrid of interpretive structural modelling (ISM) and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) to depict the level-based conceptual model and classification of the IEs’ obstacles to entry into the agrifood sector. Following that, a hybrid decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and analytic network process (ANP) called DANP was utilized to present a causal relationship between the barriers, identify their causes and effects, and also quantify the relevance of each barrier.

After employing the multi-layer decision-making approach, the results demonstrated that fundamental limitations, including infrastructure and technology limitations, are the most critical barriers alongside policy factors encompassing governmental support and access to global or regional economy/market. According to the results, innovation and economic sustainability of the agrifood supply chain also matter. All of these critical barriers are intertwined and should be planned and solved simultaneously. Furthermore, based on DANP results, the sustainability pillars (economy, environment, society), besides the low efficiency of the agrifood sector in Iran, should be investigated further for future policy makings.

A hybrid multi-layer decision-making approach has been used for analysing the barriers of investment in the agrifood sector of the emerging economy of Iran for the international entrepreneurs. Moreover, the authors provide implications and insights for IEs and officials for decision-making in the future.