Providing a strategic model of military technology spillover to civilian

Abstract

Many technologies designed in the military sector can be used in civilian sector as well. The spillover of military technologies to civil has many positive consequences at the national, commercial and defense levels. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors affecting the spillover of military technologies to civilian via a model. The research is of mixed type (qualitative-quantitative). The statistical sample of the research in the qualitative section is 17 experts in the field of defense and commercial businesses in the country who have been selected by the method of snowball until theoretical saturation. The statistical sample in the quantitative section is 177 managers and experts in these two fields who were selected by purposive and available sampling. In order to identify the effective factors, the approach based on grounded theory and software MAXQDA-2020 was used and finally the validation of the obtained model was performed by factor analysis and software SMART PLS-3. According to the research findings in the qualitative section, 148 codes were identified in the form of 7 categories and after confirmatory factor analysis, 5 codes were deleted and the final research model was approved with 143 codes and 7 categories. The results of grounded theory regarding the frequency and importance of categories of military technology spillover to civilian, show that policies and regulations, communication factors between military and civil sectors, technological capability, environmental factors, socio-cultural factors, economic and financial factors, and technological features are the most important.

Keywords

• technology
• technology spillover
• military technologies
• civilian
• mixed approach