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The purpose of this study is to examine how formal and informal institutions play a role in the Iranian context in shaping corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and practices.

Using a multiple case-study approach combining comparative and cross-sectional methods with semi-structured interviews, primary data was collected from eight corporations that actively participated in CSR activities in Iran. A microanalysis approach was used to examine the meanings and dynamics in the data. Through thematic analysis and pattern-matching techniques, the authors separately examined the roles of formal and informal institutions. Cross-case analysis was used to highlight the cases’ similarities and differences.

This study demonstrates that both formal and informal institutional structures exist in Iran and that both types influence CSR. This study also shows that informal institutions (such as personal values, culture, religion, traditions, charity and philanthropy) play a more explicit role than formal institutions (such as legal regulations and laws) in shaping CSR adoption policies and practices. The results indicate that, among institutions linked to CSR, formal and informal institutions are complementary and potentiate each other in Iran. Nevertheless, compared to formal ones, informal institutions play a more prominent role in shaping CSR policies and practices.

The authors recognize that, although the eight corporations are large, and although they interviewed their key personnel, they do not claim that these findings are generalizable, owing to the qualitative nature of the study and the small number of selected corporations.

This study makes relevant theoretical and empirical contributions. First, it contributes to the growing body of CSR literature that highlights the necessity of linking informal and formal institutions. Although the CSR literature lacks research on informal institutions in developing economies, researchers have yet to push forward and explore how the CSR adoption process works in developing economies that have influential informal institutions.

This research presents a technology roadmap for social banking in Iran. Technology roadmapping is a tool for decisionmakers to identify, assess and choose between different strategic options to achieve the best technological objectives and help companies and industries to better understand their market and technological choices. As social banking is in its infancy, it could embody different aspects. Therefore, to be successful in field of social banking, banks should define specific capabilities based on their capacities to create their own model. A social banking roadmap provides a comprehensive plan for banks to design products and services based on their capacities and create required programs for their implementation and improvement.

This paper outlines the steps for creating a technology roadmap to develop social banking services of one of Iran’s private banks. Different methods were used to implement each step mainly based on expert panels and carrying out polling and survey research among banking and IT experts.

Technology roadmaps pay special attention to the challenges and the level of capabilities (both technical and social) to develop technologies and services specially for developing countries. The level of capabilities and absorptive capacity will determine the direction of technology development. Hence, banks should design their business plan and roadmap based on their background and capabilities, state of market, their status and goals. Policymakers should help increase cooperation, financial transparency, information and payments security via appropriate legislations.

The number of banks that have entered the social banking field is limited, and as a result, activities that have been carried out in this area in the country are limited too. Therefore, there was limited access to information as well as related studies. This research has tried to extract all the contents of the roadmap. Some sub-topics such as technologies have been dealt with to a lesser depth because of the complexity in identifying and assigning each of technologies to the service features. The technology roadmap experiences in the country are limited, and it was not possible to study the existing roadmaps with regard to their confidentiality. Developing a technology roadmap requires using expert panels and conducting multiple workshops with stakeholders from private sectors, universities and industries. In this research, because of low resources, the panels were confronted with limited continuous attendance as well as the accumulation of different stakeholders.

The research results provided strategies to inform, encourage and finance banks and other businesses to use social networks appropriately and effectively. These strategies can be categorized into the actions banks should take to expand social banking in the country and the actions policymakers should take into account in this regard. They are described as follows. Banks’ strategic actions include: provide training to staff on how employees should interact with customers on social networks encompassing general information and education about services, benefits and how to use social banking services for customers and society; motivate customer participation in social banking networks; convergence and integration of various offline and online channels; focus on core banking to expand competitiveness; pay attention to sustainable and green development in providing social banking services; analysis of the competitive environment in banking and other financial industries; designing a portfolio of social services for customers and allocation of budget and resources for development of social banking services and participation with other institutions and operators in providing financial and non-financial services. Policymakers’ actions include: adopt motivational policies for participation and use of social networks; education and awareness for different stakeholders; review and update the policies and rules of IT and social networks; establish appropriate laws to protect rights of employees and customers; invest in market and university studies on social banking and related services; develop policies for using in-house software and update rules and policies for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Social banking is in its infancy in Iran and few banks deliver services of social banking in a limited scope. There is no technology roadmap for this purpose in Iran. This research presents a technology roadmap for social banking in Iran (and can be adopted for banks of other developing countries) and gives a comprehensive plan for banks to design products and services based on their capacities and create required programs to implement and improve them. The application of technology roadmapping in the field of social banking is new.

This study aims to investigate the importance and effect of asymmetric technological collaborations’ key success factors in developing countries. The number of collaborations between large enterprises and SMEs, known as asymmetric technological collaborations (ATC) is growing considerably. But this asymmetry in itself can increase the number and intensity of collaboration challenges. So far, limited studies have been conducted on the stability of ATCs, and most of them have been in the context of developed countries. Meanwhile, studying the strength and stability of collaboration in the nano industry with growing market value and increasing newcomers is of particular importance.

Here, with bionic engineering approach, we used chemistry for the first time to identify the main stability factors of ATCs and build our hypotheses and research model. To this end, we introduced the factors affecting the stability of the dative chemical bond as a bionic counterpart of corporate venture capital (CVC), which is a type of ATC, and proposed 4 hypotheses. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) method to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The analysis of survey questionnaire data from 26 asymmetric collaborations in Iran’s nanotechnology industry shows that “learning of the acceptor company” with a negative effect, “network ties” and “development of the collaboration host region” with a positive effect and “diversity in the collaboration portfolio” with an inverted U-shaped effect are the most influential factors in the stability and continuity of CVCs, respectively.

The findings of this research can be the beginning of a broad path leading to exploring and getting inspiration from chemistry to analyze management issues.

Purpose: Preserving a country’s culture is crucial for its sustainability. Handicraft is a key draw for tourism destinations; it protects any civilisation’s indigenous knowledge and culture by managing the historical, economic, and ecological ecosystems and perfectly aligns with sustainable development. It has a significant role in creating employment, especially in rural regions and is an essential contributor to the export economy, mainly in developing nations. The study focuses on the skills required and existing gaps in the handicraft industry, its development and prospects by considering women and their role in preserving and embodying the traditional art of making handicrafts.

Approach: A framework has been developed for mapping and analysing the skills required in the handicraft sector using econometric modelling; an enormous number of skills have been crowdsourced from the respondents, and machine learning techniques have been used.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that employment in this area is dependent not only on general or specialised skills but also on complex matrix skills ranging from punctuality to working in unclean and unsafe environments, along with a set of personal qualities, such as taking initiatives and specific skills, for example polishing and colour coding.

Implications: The skills mapping technique utilised in this study is applicable globally, particularly for women indulged in casual work in developing nations’ handicrafts industry. The sustainable development goals, tourism, and handicrafts are all interconnected. The research includes understanding skills mapping, which provides insights into efficient job matching by incorporating preferences and studying the demand side of casual working by women in the handicraft sector from a skills perspective.

To gain the highest performance in technological efforts, firms have to balance their technology sourcing portfolio, i.e. they have to decide how to source the required technology and whom to source from. This paper aims to tackle the issue by investigating the factors affecting the technology sourcing portfolio composition and the effect of the portfolio diversity on the performance outcome.

An inductive multiple case study was performed. Data of four biopharmaceutical producer firms in the period of 1998-2017 were collected. To expand the under study time span, the under study firms were all chosen from the first-comer ones. They entered the NBP arena in the 1998-2008 period, i.e. the period in which Iranian NBP industry was in its formation stage.

This paper detects the affecting technology-, firm-, industry- and national level factors in Iran biopharmaceutical industry and analyses their influencing mechanism. It is demonstrated that there are factors in a developing country, specifically Iran, which do not matter in developed countries. In addition, the synergistic effect of using various technology sources vehicles is confirmed.

Inaccessibility to infrastructures and global communication barrier problems are features of Iran innovation system. Such features discourage the foreign firms to make long-term investments in Iran which consequently deprives Iranian firms of their knowledge and technology. The modification of these problems is suggested.

Factors such as access to infrastructures and global communication barrier are not prevalent in developed countries; therefore, less attention has been paid to them in the literature.

This paper aims to contribute to the debate of knowledge spillover by presenting a new application for the approach of the technological innovation system (TIS).

Based on the evolutionary economics of the TIS approach, a new framework for knowledge spillover is built and applied to a case. To collect data in studying the case, a mix of quantitative–qualitative methods are used.

TIS approach can help build a framework to analyze knowledge spillover from defense to the civil sector. This framework shows the direct relationship between the functional dynamics of the system and the spillover mechanism..

Sharing the same weakness as TIS, the suggested framework does not pay attention to the contextual factors.

This framework is an analytical tool. It could be used for educational and research purposes, but it has limited power to devise policy guidelines.

This framework is an analytical tool. It could be used for educational and research purposes. But it has limited power to devise policy guidelines.

The paper deviates from the conventional literature of knowledge spillover which uses national level of system analysis. Based on TIS, it adds a new perspective to the literature which had suffered from a limited value of generalizability.