Sharif Digital Repository

Possessing second place among gas reserve owner countries worldwide, Iran enjoys a very particular position in energy supply field. The crude oil is about to be replaced by natural gas in fuel sector because of growing demand for natural gas along with depletion of crude oil reserves. Some other drivers to this change are the increase in the known reserves of natural gas, the need to monetize stranded gas reserves and the environmental pressure to minimize the flaring of associated gas and carbon dioxide emissions. In such conditions the optimum consumption of these national abundant resources results in obtaining considerable revenues and strong presence of Iran in world consumption... 

Mobile technology has become Ubiquitous and common in all over the world from the first years of 21st century. Mobile has been used as a strong media in marketing and specifically in advertising due to it’s unique features and various functions. Currently (2008) mobile media is not used very aggressively in Iran. Considering the quick expansions of mobile networks in Iran and growth of subscribers, it is anticipated that Mobile will affect many businesses and consumer market very soon in Iran. This study is the first academic research in the country on Mobile advertising via SMS. The purpose of this thesis is to provide the better understanding of the Mobile advertising via SMS in high... 

Some firms grow very rapidly, the others much more slowly. In this research we compare the founding strategies of 32 Iranian software industry new ventures that have grown very rapidly with those with much less growth. This study aims to compare these two groups of firms, in order to provide insights into the attributes of rapid-growth software firms founding strategies. Founding strategies, in this research, refers both to the characteristics of the entrepreneurs who establish the firm, and to the decisions regarding initial markets and products. Results indicate that high-growth firms used to have more experienced entrepreneurs (managerial, industry specific, and work experience). In... 

In this dissertation, our aim is to evaluate a model linking “Teamwork Quality” and “Innovative Team Climate”. Teamwork Quality is defined as the quality of interactions among team members that includes six dimensions: “Communication”, “Coordination”, “Balance of Contribution”, “Mutual Support”, “Effort”, and “Cohesion”. Innovative Team Climate refers to shared perceptions of team policies, practices and procedures in support of innovation. This construct is composed of four dimensions: “Vision”, “Participation Safety”, “Task Orientation”, and “Support of Innovation”. Firstly, we hypothesized that there are positive relations between Innovative Team Climate and Teamwork Quality itself and... 

Opportunities for creating value are shifting from managing tangible assets to managing knowledge based strategies that deploy on organizations' tangible assets: customer relationship, innovative products and services, high quality, and responsive operation processes, information technology and databases and employee capability skills and innovation" (Strategy Focused Organization, Norton, Kaplan; 1996). As organizations' value creating process shifts, learning has become one of the most important factors in value creation, and as a consequence dynamic capabilities creation. This research is concentrated on Electric Distribution Companies in Tehran region and studies knowledge management as... 

The systemic approach to innovation plays a central and somewhat unifying role within the field of innovation studies. The main tenets of the approach were developed during the last decades of twentieth century by a bunch of researchers who were tackling with the problem of the economic nature of innovation and its role in growth and competitiveness. The innovation systems approach spread out rapidly throughout the globe and established itself as a framework for studying and policy making in academia and national and supranational organizations. This vast and fast expansion, however, was accompanied by a set of critical contemplations on the theoretical soundness of the approach and also by... 

Business Intelligence (BI) became a new trend in IT applications and the organization's request for it, has notably increased. BI helps organization for better decision making. It means appropriate and correct information for appropriate person at the suitable time and in the suitable format. The key point is that only buying a BI Application doesn't mean a successful BI Implementation. The organizations should know their needs and prerequisites for implementing these applications. Strategic alignment, information usage culture and technical readiness are a bit of these prerequisites. Banks are one of the industries that use IT as a heart in their business. Some of these banks create... 

Information Technology Strategic Planning (ITSP) is performing strategic planning in Information Technology in alignment with overall goals' of organizations. An ITSP framework is consisted of stages, instructions, and models that should be used during an ITSP project. In this research an appropriate framework for public universities which are under supervision of Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran, is proposed –and not selected nor presented. Process, models, methodology and altogether framework of ITSP projects (in case of out-sourcing or doing in-house), have a vital role in the success of project. Therfore, Iranian public universities and also other educational and... 

Purpose – This study aims to: identify organizational and environmental factors affecting strategic decision-making speed; examine the relationship between those factors and innovation performance; and clarify the relationship between strategic decision-making speed and innovation performance. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted on more than 50 large-scale firms operating in the drug industry in Iran, in summer 2009. Findings – The research findings related to the linkage between participation and strategic decision-making speed indicate that extensive participation accelerates the pace of decision making. Research limitations/implications – This survey was conducted on CEOs... 

Iranian Power industry has undergone fundamental changes since deregulation started in 2003. Currently, bulk trade of electricity in the industry is mainly conducted through a day ahead wholesale market, representing over 98 percent of the exchange of electricity within the grid. Although the current market regime is under operation for over 4 years, several political, cultural and operational obstacles have hindered effective evolution of the restructuring process. Low political support from privatization of the industry assets backed by lack of confidence and trust in market economies in general, and low economic incentive of the market players has slowed down formation of an effective... 

There has been a lively debate between two major strategist groups in innovation strategy literature. The first, with Ansoff being the protagonist, pose a rational approach in describing a corporate innovation strategy formulation process while the other group, with Mintzburg as the protagonist, prescribe an incremental approach.It seems that in continuous change and uncertainty, rational approach can weakly predict the reality and one can claim that in such situations incremental approach is more effective than rational approach. Based on the review of literature and consequent classification, most of the strategies that are named as innovation strategies in literature use rational... 

Development of science and technology has been a main focus of Iranian policy makers in recent years. Knowledge based companies have been considered as a key player in this respect. However, Iranian policy making system is suffering from a lack of sophisticated understanding rooted in empirical evidences of critical factors influencing the performance of domestic knowledge based companies. This dissertation aims to provide an initial ground by studying the organizational capabilities which have influenced the success of such firms and comparing them with organizational capabilities which are mentioned in the related literature. For this purpose, four companies which are supposed to be... 

Abundant lesions caused by many factors such as bread baking process, this is due to the heavy volume of liquidity in each year is wasted. Serious approach to the problem has not been provided. Thus the direction of a group of officials is to the replacement of voluminous bread instead of traditional bread. The problem of this approach is indeed erasing and eliminates the traditional bread basket of the consumer. The voluminous bread is a westerner product and thus, over time, in your own cooking technology is quite advanced. However, traditional bread product is completely Iranian and ancient and unfortunately, for various reasons, including the cost of bread, artisans desire to capitalize... 

It is proposed, in this research, a methodology for a public sector organization to integrate policy making in human capital development and utilization area. In this case the researcher used system dynamics method for modeling and analyzing the situation, to describe the mechanisms that produce the difficulties in the organization. The researcher mentioned the differences between public sector and profit organization, in designing the main part of the model and also the use of dynamic capability approach in designing human capital development parts of it. The model built in this research, describe the events before and after the 1990s separately, according to the different policy making... 

The rapid technological changes have faced organizations with a new challenge: old and obsolete knowledge when it hampers organizational change or creates some kind of possible negative impact. Hence, in many cases, companies need to actively deal with such old and obsolete knowledge and their possible negative impacts in order to survive in highly competitive market. Defining unlearning as the intentional process of managing the old and obsolete knowledge in order to reduce its possible negative impacts, this study focuses on how organizations manage their old and obsolete knowledge and how the pattern of unlearning actions varies based on different types of knowledge.
Analyzing the... 

This study examines four models of the individual’s preference for home- and center-based telecommuting. Issues concerning the estimation of discrete models when the alternatives are non-exclusive are discussed. Two binary logit models are presented, one on the preference to telecommute from a center versus not telecommuting from a center, and the other on the preference to telecommute from a center over telecommuting from home. A model is also estimated on the following four alternatives: preferring not to telecommute, preferring either form of telecommuting, preferring to telecommute from home, and preferring to telecommute from a center. A comprehensive model of two distinct dimensions of... 

Integration of transportation demand management (TDM) policies, as a realistic and effective approach, is a challenging issue in urban policy studies. This study examines the role of transportation demand management (TDM) policy packages on commuters' mode choice in the city of Tehran. The analysis is based on the results of stated preferences survey developed by efficient choice design as a specialized type of fractional factorial design approach. Five policies, namely increasing parking cost, increasing fuel cost, cordon pricing, transit time reduction and transit access improvement, are assessed in considering six modes of travel to work place. A multinomial logit model has been developed... 

Evaluation of the effects of vehicle characteristics on accident severity is the main objective of this research. In addition to some static and dynamic features of passenger cars, some characteristics of driver and roadway are studied, too. In this research, driver injury severity is modeled as accident severity index. First, the severity of head-on, rear-end, angle and sideswipe accidents are modeled using Binary Logit models. Then, Multinomial Logit models are applied to develop driver injury severity models for head-on and rollover accidents. Finally, Nested Logit model is developed to model severity of head-on accidents to study the performance of different types of Logit models.... 

Improvement of public transportation systems through attention to service quality of these systems, is important in order to increase the use of these systems. Various quantitative and qualitative attributes of travel are known effective on service quality of public transportation. The investigated factors in this research, with refrence to regular bus system of the city of Tehran, are: in-vehicle time, fare, crowding and headway. For this purpose, the stated preference data of the respondents who travel to work by regular bus, collected. The survey was conducted during the last month of spring and 360 questionnaires were completed. Stated preference scenarios relating to aforementioned... 

Trip demand analysis is among the most important parts in comprehensive transportation studies. Developing four stage models including trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice, and assignment are so common in demand analyzing. In this study, trip generation models have been studied and to analyze data, two different methods including OLR and GWR are utilized. This study aims to examine relationship between aggregate zones in order to forecast future trips. Moreover, results of modeling trip generation with two different methods, OLR and GWR, are compared. Comparing different levels of aggregation reveals that as the number of zones decreases, the results get better. Decreasing number...