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Selecting a suitable approach to achieve sustainable economic growth, particularly in developing nations, has always been a central theme in economic research. Economists continually seek a universal factor driving this phenomenon. The theory of economic catch-up, rooted in the Schumpeterian school and informed by the developmental experiences of East Asia (South Korea, China, and Taiwan) offers a framework for understanding this growth and development. Since different sectors offer different potentials for developmental entry, selecting industries becomes a crucial question in transitioning from poverty to prosperity. Through an exploration of theoretical foundations and existing research, we've distilled four key indicators: technology life cycle, modularity of technology, explicit knowledge levels, and the extent of embodied technology transfer. These indicators serve as a framework for prioritizing and selecting industries in alignment with the catch-up approach. To determine priorities, we've assigned weights to these indicators using the hierarchical analysis method. Employing the PROMETHEE method to rank stock market industries in Iran, three industries emerged in the following order: computer and electronics, medical, optical, and measuring instruments, and automobile and spare parts. These findings provide a framework for identifying key industries in Iran's seventh development plan and industrial policy document, facilitating informed decision-making.

Technological catch-up is a very complex and time-consuming process that requires all kinds of capabilities to be acquired by the latercomer firms in order to successfully complete the various stages. This process is influenced by various factors that determine its failure or success. Considering the factors affecting the successful and unsuccessful cases in the catch-up process can gain a good insight for companies and countries that want to go through this path successfully. In this regard, in the present study, with the help of a systematic review of the literature, a framework of factors affecting the success of pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and knowledge-based industries was extracted in order to make a comparative comparison with the catch-up situation in the biopharmaceutical industry in Iran. Quantitative support of foreign and domestic studies of each of the factors by Shannon entropy method is calculated and compared with each other to identify gaps in the catch-up of the Iranian biopharmaceutical industry. The obtained results show that there is a high similarity between domestic and international articles in terms of entropy in terms of institutional environment, capability building, and technological regimes. It is also necessary to improve the unfavorable position of the domestic industry in the factors of the market catch-up, organizational issues and the catch-up strategies with the help of the proposed solutions.

Blockchain technology is one of the revolutionary technologies in service-based industries. E-health services are considered as a major economic and social activity in the world in which patients, the medical community and service providers such as insurance organizations play a key role. In Iran, e-health services have been introduced for more than a decade, but it is seriously lagging behind the leading countries. According to the Blockchain Opportunity window, a technological and economic catch-up is possible in e-health services in the country. Decentralization, data transparency, security and privacy are the key features of Blockchain technology. Therefore, in this research, through case study strategy and using documents, scientific articles, evidence, statistics and events and opinions of experts, policy factors were presented to catch-up through the Blockchain technology opportunity window. The dimensions of the proposed policy framework were presented in 4 categories: macro policies, market, financing, and technology learning and development. This study presents technological catch-up policy framework by Blockchain technology to policymakers for using in e-health services.

Recent studies on technological catch-up show a strategic shift from the whole process towards focusing on the processes. Traditionally, scholars were interested in examining the relationship between local and international sources of knowledge through quantitative methods. In more recent years, there has been a growing interest to understand the influential factors and the dynamism of catching-up processes altogether. Recent studies show that in order to reach a deeper understanding of technological catching-up by latecomers, it is crucial to focus on the challenges, difficulties and processes instead of the results per se. In this study, building on holistic case study approach, the CinnaGen Company as one of the successful catch-up companies in the Iranian biopharmaceutical industry is analyzed as a case. This research highlights the vital role of indigenous technological development effort in addition to the corroboration of the influencing factors as explicated in the literature on technological catching-up thus far. The findings of this research provide insights for biopharmaceutical industry as well as the catching-up literature.

Over the final two decades of the 20th century, a number of formerly industrializing economics achieved levels of innovative capacity commensurate with or greater than those of some economies that were historically more innovative. In this paper, I discuss the conditions and factors affecting innovative capacity. The framework of National Innovative capacity (NIC) can explain the difference in innovation and economic growth among countries. NIC is the ability of a country to produce and commercialize a flow of innovative technology over the long term. NIC depends on the strength of a nation’s common innovation infrastructure, the environment for innovation in its leading industrial clusters, and strength of linkage between these two areas. I use this framework to find the productivity of Iran NIC. The results of the estimated equations imply that there is a weak linkage between innovation and NIC.