Poultry Industry Regional Innovation System Model

Abstract

The poultry industry is one of the most important economic resources, having one of the most voluminous parts of human resources. Its scope and the growing consumption of related products have raised the need for innovation in it. This study aimed to provide a poultry industry regional innovation system model, with a pilot study on three provinces of Guilan, Mazandaran,and Golestan in Iran.This was a pluralistic, applied, descriptives urvey with quantitative ‐qualitative data. The statistical population included Iranian experts in the poultry industry. In addition tousing library resources, questionnaires and interviews were alsoused to collect data. The snowball sampling was used to select experts. Five experts were selected for interviews and 32 received questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SPSS and Modeler software, as well as the multi‐layer perceptron artificial neural network. This study employed the functional‐structural analysis approach to provide apoultry industry regional innovation system model. Overall, 15 actors, 29 institutions and six functions were identified. Data analysis confirmed the model.The findings showed that the most important indices of structural elements were Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA) among regional innovation system actors, and implementing policies toattract domestic technology and international capital among regional innovation system institutions. In addition, the results showed that all the functions of the innovation system were of great importance, among which only the innovation and entrepreneurship indices had a relatively lower performance, which requires policy makers to take measures to improve them.