The application of strategic knowledge management requires specific organization structure due to unique and particular characteristics of knowledge. In other words, by passing through industry age toward knowledge age, strategic knowledge management is considered by organizations dramatically and by considering this new competitive edge, universities should prepare an appropriate background for strategic knowledge management (encoding strategy and personalizing strategy). The primary purpose of this research is to find out whether there is a meaningful relationship between organizational structure (recognition, focus and complexity) and strategic knowledge management (codification strategy and personalization strategy) in Azad University, Kermanshah. Organizational structure is considered as independent variables and strategic knowledge management is dependent variables. When it comes to the purpose, present research is an applicable research and based on its nature and method, it is descriptive and survey research. Statistical society consists of university president, vise-president and dean of faculties of Azad University, Kermanshah; during a period of the first half of the year of 2011. Therefore, the sampling method is stratified sampling. Statistical society contains 60 people who are adjusted to 52 sample people by the use of Morgan table. Data collection tool is questionnaire structure questionnaire of Robbins and strategic knowledge management questionnaire of Carolina & ?ngelL. The results of the research show that there is a meaningful relationship between organizational structure and strategic knowledge management in Azad University, Kermanshah, according to codification and personalization strategy. Some suggestions are offered at the end of this research.

In global market, factors such as precedence of competitors extending shave on market, promoting quality of services and identifying customers & apos; needs are important. This paper attempts to identify strategic services in one of the biggest governmental banks in Iran called Melli bank for getting competition merit using Kano and SERVQUAL compound models and to extend operation quality and to provide suitable strategies. The primary question of this paper is on how to introduce high quality services in this bank. The proposed model of this paper uses a hybrid of three quality-based methods including SERVQUAL, QFD and Kano models. Statistical society in this article is all clients and customers of Melli bank who use this banks & apos; services and based on random sampling method, 170 customers were selected. The study was held in one of provinces located in west part of Iran called Semnan. Research findings show that Melli banks & apos; customers are dissatisfied from the quality of services and to solve this problem the bank should do some restructuring to place some special characteristics to reach better operation at the heed of its affairs. The characteristics include, in terms of their priorities, possibility of transferring money by sale terminal, possibility of creating wireless pos, accelerating in doing bank works, getting special merits to customers who use electronic services, eliminating such bank commission, solving problems in least time as disconnecting system, possibility of receiving foreign exchange by ATM and suitable parking in city.

In this paper, we perform an empirical study to investigate the impact of economical stability on the amount of investment coming from the private sector. We calculate macroeconomics instability index (MII) using the existing methods in the literature. We have also used Glezakos (1973) method [Glezakos,C.(1973). Export instability and economic growth: A statistical verification. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 21(3), 670-678.], which considers long-term deviation of real values as instability index. Therefore, we use four variables of inflation rate (TINF), the ratio of budget deficit on growth domestic product (GDP) (TBD), foreign debt on GDP (TFD) and the ratio of actual currency rate on nominate currency (TRO). The preliminary results show that the short-term changes on logarithm of investment from private sector (LNIP) with one lag and logarithm of value added (LNIV) have positive impact on LNIP. In addition, any short term changes on logarithm of MII (LNMII) has negative and meaningful impact on LNIP and approximately 0.67 percent of difference between the actual and long term are discounted in each period. The results indicate that instability index has negative effect even in short term on Iran & apos; s industry. This shows the relevant importance of instability on economy.

This paper introduces a tool named EB-QFD used for electronic business planning in strategic issues. Nowadays, the challenges of manufacturing sectors for achieving global competition will depend on their speed to change from domestic to world class manufacturing organizations, also the rapid global deployment of electronic business, information technology and their benefits have required managers to make decision, which look for a balance world class manufacturing factors with strategic business goals. To ensure that selected e-business strategies meet world class manufacturing requirements, organizations should simultaneously explore and communicate the relationship between world class manufacturing and electronic business. Electronic business planners can achieve competitive advantages through the implementation of an integration of quality function deployment (QFD) with electronic business (EB) called EB-QFD. This study is based on data collected from an Iranian auto parts manufacturing company and the implementation of EB-QFD. In this research, EB-QFD contains two parts named EB-WHATs as needs of Electronic Business and EB-HOWs as resources for EB-WHATs. Statistical analysis points that there are positive relationships between using EB-WHATs and EB-HOW and world class manufacturing factors as competitive advantages. We used electronic business systems for EB-WHATs and resource based view (RBV) for EB-HOWs.

Entrepreneurs are the driving force behind the prospect and growth of the societies. Sound and wise decisions pave the way for them to carry out these highly important functions. Entrepreneurs are to discover and exploit opportunities. Therefore, they must gather sufficient and pertinent information. Entrepreneurs, like most human beings face complex and ambiguous decision-making situations, not to mention their lack of time and source to gather and process the data. Under these circumstances, entrepreneurs are prone making biases decisions. There are many reasons identified for this entrepreneurial decision making biases, such as the high cost of rational decision making, limitations in information processing, differences in their styles and procedures, or information overload, environmental complexity, environmental uncertainty. These biases are neither totally harmful nor completely useful and have to be seen as natural human characteristics. What makes entrepreneurial decision-making biases important is their effects on the decisions and thus the outcome of the enterprises. Entrepreneurial decision-making biases, deliberate or unintentional can seal the fate of the enterprises, therefore studying them meticulously is crucial. Literature has shown that experience could be an effective factor in decision-making biases. In this paper, we try to find out the impact of experience in Iranian high tech entrepreneurs’ major decision-making biases by a qualitative approach. Finally, it was concluded that experience is influential in shaping overconfidence bias.

Tendency to industrial clustering at the end of the twentieth century was a turning point in industrial development programs in most countries of the world. Industrial clustering is a model of industrial organization, which has entered industrial literature as a new development strategy. Clustering has provided utilization of efficiencies of scale and aggregation as well as efficiencies of collective efforts by creating conditions for competitiveness advantage, economical growth and export development in the international environment. Today, industrial clustering has been considered as a fundamental strategy for economic development and growth in almost all countries of the world including Iran. This paper aims to assess and to explain important factors affecting the competitiveness of industrial clusters. It also shows the relationship among these factors together. The proposed study uses fuzzy DEMATEL technique; hence, the affecting factors of competitiveness of industrial clusters in the automotive cluster in one of the provinces of Iran is investigated and the importance of each of these factors and their relationships are identified.

Torrance tests of creative thinking have been widely used to measure the impact of different items such as creativity on different groups of children. In this study, we perform an empirical study to measure the effects of endurance, power-based and flexibility on a group of children's creativity, originality and flexibility. The study chooses a sample of 341 from 2978 preschool children and distributes a questionnaire among them where 153 were female and 188 of them were male. Cronbach alpha for creativity, originality and fluency were calculated as 0.814, 0.822 and 0.788, respectively. The results of our study indicate that there are some positive and meaningful relationship among three components of creativity, originality and fluency before and after accomplishing test. The impact of test was measured for three types of sport activities including endurance, power-based and flexibility tests. After applying 32 sessions of sporting games, flexibility games represent a mean value of 32.40, which is higher than the other two tests and it maintains meaningful value compared with two other sporting tests of endurance and power base tests.

During the last decades, the importance of small firms as one of the main economical parts in each country has been proved. Considering to the resources limitation in one hand, and the competitive global market in the other hand, it is very important that firms can obtain sustainable competitive advantages (SCAs) to compete with other rivals. This paper, at the first step, tries to explore the potentially SCAs of Qom & apos; s small firms by using of Structural Equation Model (SEM). Then, the real current situation of firms in using these competitive advantages has been examined. The results tell that except firms & apos; location, other potentially SCAs do not have acceptable condition.

Intellectual capital is a type of asset measuring ability of economic agency in order tomake wealth. These assets do not have physical and objective nature and are intangible assets being achieved through utilization of relative assets with human resources, organizational operation and foreign relations from economic agency. Measuring this issue is important from intra-organizational and extra-organizational views. In this paper, we present survey based on Fuzzy TOPSIS to find important factors influencing intellectual capital management. The proposed model of this paper considers different factors, which exist in the literature and prioritize them based on different criteria. The results of our survey identified seven items as the most influencing factors.

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.