Ethical Issues and Obligations in Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship in Iran

Since attending to the knowledge based economy provide the country with the more obvious and accessible sustainable development and supreme achievement horizon, it needs to a strong support to be drawn. Due to the impact of professional ethics in this field, it is a strong support for the achievement of national economic advantage. A comprehensive review found that previous research in this area is scarce. Therefore, this research can be considered as the first step to achieve that strong support and seeks to explain the ethical issues and obligations that should be imagined for knowledge based entrepreneurship in Iran. By identifying them, we can strengthen the foundations of professional ethics in the beginning step of the process. Further, prior research in the field of entrepreneurship ethic has mainly focused on overall and absolute concept of professional ethics in entrepreneurship but this research can be viewed as a sample for investigating entrepreneurship ethic especially in knowledge based entrepreneurship. The purpose is tracked by a qualitative research using event-driven interview. Interview questions were carefully designed and selected to consider all aspects and not to leave out any research question that its answer will help to the study. Interview questions were based on both Star and 5W1H models; additionally, matrix multiplication of questions related to each dimension was designated and then was revised according to the expert opinion. 20 knowledge based entrepreneurs were asked to answer these questions. Firstly, in addition to seven dimensions of primary conceptual model, three new dimensions were identified that knowledge based entrepreneurs should determine their ethical policies towards them in which it changed a seven-dimension model to a ten-dimension model for knowledge based entrepreneurs. These three new dimensions include intellectual ownership, academic partners and corporate researchers. The issues and obligations of each of ten dimensions were then extracted and categorized based on ethical issues and challenges of entrepreneurs.