Search results

Many devices needed electrical power to work, thus, major energy carriers such as oil and gas were used to generate electrical power via converter mechanisms and special technologies. The microturbine is a developed technology that is remarkable for its relatively high performance and ability to use several types of fuels. Microturbines are economically feasible because of the production of combined heat and power and small-scale applicability. This study aims to investigate microturbine technology development to support modern energy access in a developing country (i.e. Iran).

This paper presents a technology foresight methodology to create plausible futures of microturbine development in Iran when the country faces different driving forces and uncertainties. On other hand, the paper deals with a theoretical question: how to select appropriate foresight methodology? A procedure is proposed, which equipped the research team to select appropriate method combinations based on Popper’s diamond. Finally, the selected methodology includes defining focal issues environmental scanning and patent analysis aimed at developing five plausible scenarios for microturbine development future in Iran and creating shared visions among policymakers.

This paper proposed a series of scenarios on the path to developing microturbine technology. The scenario development logic in a participatory way contains a common four-quarter technique that attempts to depict scenarios based on two critical uncertainties inclusive energy price and technology obsolescence, which will shape the future. Also, a scenario is presented to describe a wild card that can disturb the desired futures. Such materials help decision-makers to policies under plausible conditions that guarantee a robust policy basket.

The originality of this paper can be studied based on two aspects, first, the methodology that provides a systematic method selections procedure in an emerging complex technology development program. Second, from the practical aspect, this paper is one of the very first attempts to manage the microturbine technology development program. Then, results are used to feed the policy-making process in Iran.

In the case of Iran, about 19 years have passed since the announcement of general energy policies. Policies adopted in the past included too many approaches and goals for the energy sector that some of them are in conflict with each other and their simultaneous implementation was impossible. Therefore, many of the expected goals of these policies have not been achieved. It is very important to adopt an appropriate approach that is compatible with the country’s characteristics and can steer energy policies. Therefore, this study aims to adopt an appropriate approach for the country’s energy sector according to the conditions and needs of the country.

A participatory scenario technique is designed and used to develop plausible projections in the case of Iran’s energy futures. Based on the proposed methodology, the research process starts with data gathering through interviews and national plans analysis. Then, findings were used as inputs to a simulation-based scenario development process. Scenarios are developed based on Monte Carlo simulation via cross-impact analysis technique purified based on expert judgments.

In this paper, to recognize Iran’s general approach to energy in the next 20 years, driving forces of change were introduced and used as input for the scenario development phase. Results showed sanctions play a significant role in Iran’s energy future and determine the directions of other driving forces. For renewable energy, it was proposed to increase the renewable share in Iran’s electricity generation mix to 5% of the total installed capacity. In the case of fossil fuel extraction, the maximum efficient rate was proposed for both oil and natural gas national production strategy.

This research is novel both in terms of application and theory. A new participatory scenario development method is used using simulations that are equipped based on experts’ judgments. Also from the practical perspective, this research targeted a future-oriented challenging problem to initialize national policy in a resource-rich developing economy (i.e. Iran).

COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced human society; statistics have shown many countries ended 2020 with minimal or even negative economic growth. This pandemic proved that development biased to economic issues without considering other factors such as social and environmental is not sustainable, and it can even be the source of the crisis. This paper aims to discover plausible alternative futures at the macrolevel where nations, businesses and societies can change routines, and approach to a better peaceful future.

To accomplish this, trends emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic are studied and some uncertainties are identified. At the intersections of uncertainties, scenarios are shaped based on the Global Business Network (GBN) methodology. GBN helps to draw macrolevel images about plausible futures. The main uncertainties rose from three different but interconnected natures including: approach to the globalization (social perspective), approach to the concept of value (business perspective) and approach to the governance (states/governance perspective). Each uncertainty can take two extreme alternatives; consequently, eight scenario spaces with different probability are formed by the intersection of alternatives. Then the most favorable scenario is introduced and strategies are proposed to achieve a better future.

In the current paradigm in which countries will sacrifice the environment for economic growth in the race to rapidly rebuild their economy, concerns for the post-COVID-19 will continue to mount. While, in the favorable scenario, value creation is sought in sustainable development. This means deviation from a favorable scenario to achieve short-term goals is completely predictable. Although we have learned that the COVID-19 pandemic is controllable and manageable as time goes by, but no effort or commitment has been seen in the governments to eradicate the COVID-19 sources (at least till today).

The main originality of this research appeared in the practical aspect. This paper analyzes and projects scenarios at the global level and studies challenges that societies, governments and businesses are facing in the modern world with biased development paradigms. Moreover, different viewpoints to deal with global crisis are assessed and criticized.

Studying previous science and technology (S&T) foresight activities reveals information that helps decision makers to redesign policy-making templates aimed at dealing with new millennium challenges. To propose policy recommendations about further S&T foresight programs in Iran, this paper aims to propose a three-phase process to study historical S&T foresight activities at national and sub-national level since 2005 to 2015, to analyze the state of selected activities to discover weaknesses and potential solutions and, finally, to provide strategies and tactics to improve further S&T foresight activities through an expert-based process.

This paper provides a three-stage methodology, designed to survey Iranian historical foresight practices (study) using scoping framework equipped with additional features, diagnosis and evaluating (analyze) and finally proposing recommendations to organize and implement more efficient further foresight practices (design) to initialize further practices in developing countries such as Iran.

Although concerns about future and the importance of foresight activities are raised however Iranian foresight community needs to be developed. As noted in Section 5, Iranian foresight facilitators and specialist are biased to limited methodologies and methods; therefore, creating foresight networks and developing communities is strongly recommended.

The main constraint of this research was lack of valid data in the case of some Iranian S&T foresight programs.

Iran as a developing country needs to plan for long-run programs; however, there is no integrated study which reviews and analyzes the previous attempts to dedicate insights about how to reframe existing foresight paradigms. As foresight practices facilitate the paths toward sustainability, analyzing and diagnosis of a series of foresight practices in a devolving country may initialize designing such efforts in less developed world.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review e-lending research studies in the digital library domain to identify their subjects, existing research gap and their research methods.

This is a systematic review. Through several stages of searching in related databases, 30 research works including journal and conference research papers, theses and dissertations, research and technical reports were identified and reviewed based on the guidelines of systematic review protocols.

It was found that research in e-lending domain is growing, and the subject will receive greater attention in the near future. Studies were in the following four categories: e-books (specifications, creation and software and viewpoints), business models, e-book status in libraries and copyright issues, e-book lending and inter-library loan. Some research gaps were identified including e-lending domain, business models and legislation. Little has been done with qualitative and mixed approaches in terms of research methods. Moreover, findings showed that this area has received less attention in developing countries.

This is the first review of the e-lending domain in digital libraries. It identifies the key works related to e-lending, categorizes them, provides an overview and identifies emerging research issues.

The purpose of this paper is to envision the alternative futures of the design and manufacturing industry using an integrated foresight method based on scenario planning. Also, the authors aim at developing robust strategies for an enterprise that aims to be placed as a leading high-tech international design and manufacturing company in 2035.

The proposed approach is created by integrating several foresight methods such as Delphi, scenario planning, MICMAC and cross-impact analysis.

Automation and sustainable development are found as the fundamental driving forces in the design and manufacturing industry. Four scenarios based on these driving forces and expert knowledge are created: innovation adaptation, forced automation (business-as-usual), sustainable era and automationless scenarios. For the developed scenarios, a set of strategies are proposed by asking experts about the strategies which can be taken to make the enterprise competitive in all developed scenarios in 2035. The main macro-level outcome is that economic and technological drivers will be the most important factors for design and manufacturing, followed by environmental and social factors.

The proposed method uses the strengths of traditional scenario planning but overcomes its weaknesses by suggesting a systematic process for scenario building and easy application.

The purpose of this study is to identify the situation of evaluating Iranian digital libraries using DigiQUAL protocol.

Evaluative survey research method is used in this study to assess digital libraries. In this way, digital libraries of Iranian research institutes constitute the study population. DigiQUAL protocol actually was used to evaluate eight Iranian digital libraries. Systematic observation and interview based on researcher-made checklist was used for data collection. In fact, checklist was constructed based on DigiQual protocol.

The results showed that Digital Library of Isfahan Science and Technology Town has the best performance and Noor digital library has the lowest operation in studied digital libraries. The overall score of all studied digital libraries was under 60 (out of 100) which shows the average performance of the digital libraries.

This study emphasizes on evaluating active digital libraries in Iran by DigiQUAL protocol. Because digital libraries are new in Iran and their progress need to evaluate their activity, this research was done to demonstrate their situation.

This study aims to elucidate institutional analysis as an effective approach to investigating and designing the multilevel policymaking system of online social networks (OSN) for achieving a participatory model.

The institutional mapping approach has been used to analyze Iran’s OSN multilevel policymaking system. A combination of two matrices, including institutions-institutions and institutions-functions, was used to perform the institutional mapping. Two main steps were taken to draw the mentioned matrices. First, a review of related studies in Iran’s OSN policymaking system was conducted and the policy functions mentioned in these studies were identified and categorized using the meta-synthesis. Second, based on analyzing two policy documents of Iran’s OSN, institutions and their interactions were identified and policy functions were allocated to institutions.

Based on the results, the most important policy functions in the current OSN policymaking system in Iran are support, regulatory, monitoring and evaluation, business environment development, culture building and promotion, organizing licenses and permissions, policymaking and legislation. Also, the results show that there are shortcomings in this system, some of the most important of which are lack of transparency in regulatory, little work in culture building and promotion, neglect of the training of specialized human resources and research and development, slow development of the business environment and neglecting the role of nongovernmental organizations in policymaking.

By examining and analyzing how different institutions operate within a multilevel policymaking system, the policymaking process and its overall effectiveness can be enhanced. This analysis helps identify any inconsistencies, overlaps or conflicts in the roles and policies of these institutions, leading to a better understanding of how a multilevel policymaking system is organized.

The purpose of the current paper is to analyze the simultaneous effects of oil sanctions and financial sanctions on Iran's macroeconomic variables in a small open economy in the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework.

A DSGE model with the new Keynesian approach has been designed for the above mentioned purpose giving consideration to households, production, trade, oil, government and central bank sectors. All of the parameters were calibrated by using geometric means of macroeconomic variables in 2004–2017 as the steady-state values of the variables in the static model.

Amplifying the intensity of the oil sanctions reduces oil production due to decreasing investment, technology and export of oil and reduces the central bank's foreign reserves ratio to the money base that leads to an increasing exchange rate. Furthermore, oil sanctions decrease the government revenues due to a decrease in oil export and by the government imposing an expansionary fiscal policy in the form of increasing current expenditure and preserving construction expenditure to prevent deepening the recession, which causes budget deficit and then the issue of more bonds with a higher nominal interest rate. On the other hand, financial sanctions raise transaction costs and marginal costs in the trade sectors that lead to inflation and a decrease in nonoil export and various kinds of imports. Due to inflation and uncertainty, consumption of a household increases and investment expenditure of a household decreases.

To the best of the author's knowledge, few studies in the world have analyzed the economic effect of the sanctions in the framework of DSGE models. There is no study in Iran to date which investigates the effects of the sanctions in the form of a DSGE model. So, this paper is the first study in Iran and one of the few studies in the world using a DSGE model for analyzing the effects of sanctions. Imposing three kinds of oil sanctions in addition to a financial sanction is another innovation of the current paper.

Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationships among OC, KS, OCB and OI “Organization” is often seen as a company and few studies pay much attention to tribes and other related organizations and communities of Indigenous peoples. However, Indigenous peoples production organizations (IPPOs) would be certainly influenced by factors from the internal/external, including organizational culture (OC), organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), knowledge sharing (KS) and organizational innovation (OI). Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationships among OC, KS, OCB and OI.

Based on valid 139 Indigenous workers in IPPOs, this study used structural equation modeling to validate the relationships among OC, OCB, KS and OI.

The empirical findings indicate that OC would significantly influence OCB and OI, whereas KS would not have significant impact on OI. In addition, OC would not influence KS as usual, whereas OCB would do. Finally, OCB would impact KS.

As OCB acts as a complete mediator in OC–KS relationship, it means that these IPPOs already have OCB to motivate their staffs to do KS, but not enough to achieve more excellent performance on innovation.

Compared to past studies, this study aims to investigate the theory of organizational behavior and whether it is suitable between general businesses and IPPOs.