In his message to the fourth international and eighth national conference of technology management (IRAMOT 2014), the minister of science, research and technology said that the ministry seeks to establish academic firms in a bid to commercialize technologies that are being developed at domestic universities.
These firms are expected to be run by university professors, Mohammad Farhadi said on Monday.
The ministry’s most important policy is to turn universities into “scientific business hubs,” according to Farhadi, the new minister who was given a vote of confidence in the parliament last week after four candidates failed to win the vote.
He said he would also seek to “connect the chain of science to production and to develop knowledge-based companies.”
Besides focusing on problem-oriented research defined by agencies in order to solve national and regional problems, the ministry is also seeking cooperation with corporations and SMEs to conduct research activity and make joint investment, said the minister.
Recently Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has called on authorities to allocate about four percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) to research and development activity.
Also, the universities and industrial units will launch joint courses in a bid to enhance university-industry cooperation, he added.
The vice president for policy making and strategic assessment, Sepehr Ghazi Nouri, said that the government is preparing a bill for intellectual property rights (IPR) to help young Iranian engineers act more creatively. “The action is taken in a bid to put an end to the legal deficiencies about IP in Iran,” said Ghazi Nouri.
IRAMOT 2014 kicked off in the southern Kish Island on Monday and would finish its work on Tuesday.
