Desired State of Entrepreneurial IT Organizations: An Analysis Based on Iran’s SMEs

In recent years, developing countries have been faced with the problem of an increased number of unemployed people, requiring more attention on expanding the enterprising culture and to develop information technology. In this paper, the entrepreneurial IT SMEs in Iran are studied to determine their status quo, offering a conceptual framework for desired state, comparison between the state quo, and the desired state, which identifies their barriers. Considering the characteristics of Iran’s business atmosphere, both can be divided into real and legal entrepreneurs. Results show that the majority of entrepreneurial IT SMEs are in a desired state regarding their strategy of growth rate implicitly, clear and pre-defined views, not being in the infancy stage of life cycle, participating staff in decision-making, and financially supplying research and development. Also, the major internal obstacles in these SMEs are lacking creativity and innovation techniques among their staff, shortage of experts, the presence of formal, vertical, and top-down authorities, lack of flat organizational structure, and the major extra-organizational barriers among others.