University-Industry interactions in Brazil: Mapping research groups database from 2004
Author(s)
Righi, Hérica Morais
Rapini, Márcia Siqueira
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Abstract
The innovative activity is an important instrument to promote countries and
economies development (Schumpeter, 1982). It’s important to stress that it's not an
individual effort but a result of a collective process (Nelson, 2004). Inside this dynamic
that university-industry interaction should be understood and investigated.
The importance of the university-industry linkage has been frequently discussed
in the literature about National System of Innovation (NSI). In the innovative process,
firms play an important role since they generate new technologies with the support from
others institutions. In this context, universities develop and train human resources and
generate scientific knowledge that can be used in firms’ innovative activities. So,
interactive relationships between firms and universities can be a powerful source of
innovation and news technologies generation.
Based on the assumption that university-industry (U-I) interaction is specific to
each country, as it depends on national Science and Technology (S&T) infrastructure,
the aim of this paper is an initial effort to map this interaction in Brazil by university’s
perspective. So, it will be analyzed the database from CNPq’s Directory of Research
Groups. The unit of investigation is the research groups that declared any relationship
with productive sector in 2004.
CNPq, is a 50-year-old organization of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and
Technology, responsible for distributing research grants to the Brazilian scientific and
technological communities. Its Directory of Research Groups is a database, which
started to be collected in the early 1990s and is renewed every second year. It comprises
detailed information about research activities in Brazil using the ´Research group’ as the
unity of analysis. The directory provides an excellent proxy for studying research
activities in Brazil, even though the adherence to it is voluntary3. Although there are
limitations intrinsic to information collection, the database supplies some importance
evidence from recent university-industry interactions in Brazil that will be used in this
paper. Beyond this introduction, the article has 4 more sections. The next section
summarizes the background from university-firms interactions embracing the main
contributions of academic activities to firm’s innovation and the sectoral specificities in
university-firms interactions. Section two describes the database and the methodology
used to construct it. Section three shows university-firms interactions in Brazil in
different level of investigation being in state level, knowledge area, size of the firms and
interactive disciplines areas and firms sector of activity. Finally remains the conclusion
of the paper.
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Date
2008-09
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