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ItemDo linkages between commercial farmers and academic researchers influence researcher productivity? The Mexican case(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-07) Rivera, René ; Sampedro, José Luis ; Dutrénit, Gabriela ; Ekboir, Javier Mario ; Vera-Cruz, José Alexandre OliveiraThis paper explores the effect of commercial farmers-academic researchers linkages on research productivity in fields related to agriculture. Using original data and econometric analysis, our findings show a positive and significant relationship between commercial linkages and research productivity, when this is defined as publications in ISI journals. This evidence seems contrary to other contributions that argue that strong ties with the business sector reduce research productivity and distort the original purposes of university, i.e., conducting basic research and preparing highly-trained professionals. When research productivity is defined more broadly adding other types of research outputs, the relationship is also positive and significant confirming the argument that close ties between public research institutions and businesses foster the emergence of new ideas that can be translated into innovations with commercial and/or social value.
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ItemWhat are the factors driving academy-industry linkages in latecomer firms: Evidence from Mexico(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-07) Torres, Arturo ; Dutrénit, Gabriela ; Sampedro, José Luis ; Becerra, NoéIt is now widely recognized that Universities can play a fundamental role on the performance of the firms’ innovation activities, because they are the main producers and transmitters of knowledge (Narin, Hamilton and Olivestro, 1997; Cohen, Nelson and Walsh, 2002; Arocena and Sutz, 2001). In the pursuit of innovation, firms interact with other organizations to gain, develop and exchange various kinds of knowledge, information and other resources (Edquist, 1997, 2001). In the context of the so called “Knowledge Based Economy”, the reliance of firms on knowledge built in the Universities has become even more important than in the past (Etzkowitz et al, 2000; Brundenius et al, 2008). A major reason for this is an enlargement in the complexity of production (Howells, 2000). So that, many governments of both, developed and developing countries have introduced an increasing range of policies encouraging the involvement of Higher Education Institutes and also Public Research Centers (HEI/PRC) in technology transfer to firms (D’Este and Patel, 2007; Arocena and Sutz, 2001). In the case of developing countries, HEI/PRC might be a vehicle through which technologies and organizational forms of advanced countries can be absorbed locally. They have also the potential to generate appropriate technological inputs in close interaction with local firms. Despite the growing interest among academics and policy makers, there are a number of gaps in our understanding of academy-industry linkages. In particular, most of the literature on this issue has centred on developed countries, and the academic capacities of HEI/PRC. Much less has been written regarding in detail the state and characteristics of academy-industry linkages looking at the firm’s perspective, particularly in latecomer countries. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the modes of Academy-Industry interaction and the factors explaining them in the case of latecomer firms. Structural and innovation effort related factors have been introduced in a logistic model (logit binomial and multinomial models), in order to analyse a sample of Mexican manufacturing firms. Linkages with HEI and PRC are distinguished looking for different interaction paths. The paper is organised as follows: after this introduction, section 2 reviews basic literature on this issue, section 3 describes the data and methods, section 4 discusses the findings, and finally section 5 contains some reflections.
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ItemAcademy-Industry interactions at three different stages of the linking process: Micro evidence from the perspective of both agents(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-07) Dutrénit, Gabriela ; De Fuentes, ClaudiaAcademy-industry linkages can play an important role for economic development. Both agents can benefit from interaction, but they have a different perspective regarding the reasons to interact, the main knowledge flows and the benefits derived from the interaction. The main aim of this paper is to analyze these interactions from both perspectives during three different stages of the linking process: i) main reasons to interact; ii) knowledge flows during the interaction; and iii) main results derived from interaction. This study is based on original data collected by two surveys carried out in Mexico during 2008, to R&D and product development managers of firms and to academic researchers; 341 innovative firms and 451 academic researchers answered the questionnaire.3 We performed descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis techniques to analyze the data. Main characteristics of academy-industry in Mexico are: academy is not the main but an important source of knowledge for firms; human resources mobility is an important knowledge flow mechanism from firms´ perspective; academy-industry interaction is more intense for ‘radical innovation’ than for incremental innovation; and researchers oriented to applied science and technological development are those who interact more with firms, but basic science researchers also interact. Concerning to the stages of the linking process, for the first stage we found that firms’ main reasons to interact are to increase their basic/intermediate technological capabilities and to complement them. The main barrier to interaction from both perspectives is the lack of knowledge of each one of the agents regarding the activities of the other. An additional barrier for firms is their belief that they have enough in-house capabilities, which may reveal a limited concern to absorb external knowledge. For the second stage, we found that researchers and firms have different perspectives regarding the importance of knowledge flows; firms value more knowledge flows from human resources, while researchers find more important collaborative R&D and consultancy as knowledge flows mechanisms. For the third stage, we identified the main benefits from interaction analyzing both perspectives, even though the interactions are not broadly spread in Mexico, those researchers and firms engaged in collaboration categorize them as successful, benefiting from the use of installations, publications, prototypes, etc. However, differences in the perception of benefits from both agents limit interactions and thus the possibility to initiate virtuous circles in the production and diffusion of knowledge.
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ItemA resource-based strategy for technological dynamism and social inclusion for Latin America: a discussion in the light of the Mexican experience(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-10-07) Vera-Cruz, José Alexandre Oliveira ; Dutrénit, GabrielaLatin America faces today a crossroads, as the advances in the globalization impose the need to redefine its position in the world economy for the next decades. After the reform process of the late 1980s and 1990s was implemented some Latin American countries showed important growth results in a range of dimensions: education indexes, income per capita, and exports competitiveness in specific world markets. Also there has been significant advancement in democratization and organization of the civil society. In institutional terms, the level of sophistication of the NSI increased considerably; there have been important advances in terms of the variety of agents and the deployment of their functions. Many countries have improved their level of industrialization and today they are considered to be middle income economies. However the growth performance of most countries in the 1990s has been rather disappointing. Besides this unsatisfactory growth performance, equity aspects and social needs constitutes important worrying characteristic of contemporary trends in the region. The limited achievements of Latin American economies as compared to the success of several Asian economies have highlighted the urgent need that the region have to start building upon a new way of thinking its strengths, and built a new insertion in the world economy. But, what are the analytical tools that it can count upon? The NSI and RSI approaches have been broadly diffused, as well as the ‘fitting’ innovation policies to strengthen these systems. In both cases the analytical frameworks were though for other context, the central economies environment, and there have been difficulties in adapting them to the region’s conditions. Partially this explains the poor achievement obtained and makes clear the need that Latin America has to rethink all these ideas from its own perspective and conditions. Latin America has important endowments of natural resources and many countries have specialized on manufacturing sectors and got position in world markets. However, natural resources have been mostly seen as a source of funding manufacturing activities and industrialization; to the extreme, this has been seen as a discouragement to look for alternatives for development due to the success of raw materials export. In the last decades, after the crisis of the import industrialization model, there has been an increasing attention to the role of natural resources as an alternative for Latin America. In this direction, Katz (2000) argues that Latin-American countries have restructured in the direction of their underlying ‘natural’ (static) comparative advantages, making better use of their high quality natural resources (mines, forests, gas and petroleum, agriculture) as well as of the abundant, relatively cheap and unskilled labor. These changes in production specialization came hand-in-hand with concomitant changes in the trade specialization. Referring to changes in innovation systems, Arocena and Sutz (2005) argument that advances of knowledge in biological fields have provided a new basis for transformations in the production of goods and services. This may apply to the emergence of innovation systems based on life sciences (bio-innovation systems), which are connected with agriculture and health services. However, until now there has not been an explicit strategy for development considering natural resources. In the last few years, has emerged a new perspective on their contribution to development (de Ferranti, Perry, Lederman and Maloney 2001 Bortagaray 2007, Perez 2008), the most articulated proposal of a strategy for Latin America has been presented by Perez (2008). Recently, Carlota Perez presented the document titled “A vision for Latin America: a resource-based strategy for technological dynamism and social inclusion”, elaborated for ECLA. This document reflects about Latin America’s opportunities during the current deployment stage of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) paradigm, and the installation stage of a new paradigm, which seems to be oriented towards biotechnology, nanotechnology, new materials and new energy sources. It suggests a dual development strategy for Latin American countries – “dual integrated model” – based on science, technology and innovation (STI) for building robust resource based-processing industries and specializing on high added value products. Such a model integrates a top-down strategy of development, which aims at achieving competitiveness on world markets for specialized natural resources-based products, with a bottom-up strategy, which seeks to generate employment and identify and promote wealth-creation activities amongst localities. As it has been broadly discussed, each paradigm implies not only technological change but also new ways of thinking or a new common sense towards efficiency and innovation, new ways of acting and new institutions (Dosi 1982, Perez 1985 and 2002). In this sense, in order to establish a strategy that benefits from the deployment of a paradigm or takes advantage of the installation stage, it requires the emergence of new social norms and new forms of agents’ behavior. In this proposal of a dual strategy, social norms related to STI and forms of behavior acquire a particular relevance. Social norms are built and change at a slow pace. They are inserted into the social systems that operate inside society, and even more, they influence the forms of behavior from academics, entrepreneurs and other agents, and even society’s perception regarding the STI community.3 The behavior of agents obeys to social norms, and therefore, while facing paradigm shifts, and even other changes of minor depth, agents tend to reproduce old ways of doing things and observe difficulties in changing their behaviors. Social norms are influenced by existing incentives. In this way, policy should generate a range of incentives consistent with the paradigm, in order to foster new opportunities, and stimulate change in agents’ behavior. Difficulties to generate a new coherent incentives structure could restrict the shift towards new behaviors, and therefore, towards the diffusion of new technologies and the taking advantage of a new window of opportunity. This is why a reflection oriented to taking advantage of a window of opportunity should include the issue of the incentives structure required to induce change amongst agents’ behavior and promote new ways of thinking and acting. There is limited knowledge regarding the influence of public policy over the shift in established social norms and the behavior of the STI community. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the dual strategy based on natural resources for Latin America proposed by Carlota Perez (2008). It focuses on the required changes of the existing incentives to promote new behaviors among STI agents according to the mentioned strategy, and on other issues related to the viability of such strategy, such as leadership and the building of consensus and governance. This reflection draws on the Mexican case. The Mexican experience is interesting for different reasons: there are abundant natural resources and important technological capabilities in resource based processing industries, also it has been built capabilities in other manufacturing industries; there has also been a huge effort devoted to the formation of human resources, and recently, STI is flourishing in several regions of the country. Additionally, since 2001 a change has been introduced in the design of STI policy oriented to accelerating the building of technological capabilities and stimulating innovation. The experience of designing and implementing this STI policy and the problems that it has been confronted allow the identification of some caveats associated with the design and implementation of a new strategy. The content of this document is as follows: after this introduction section 2 raises some doubts about the applicability of the current innovation policy framework to DC context; section 3 presents a brief description of Carlota Perez´s proposal of the dual strategy of development based on natural resources; section 4 synthesizes efforts that have taken place in Mexico during the last decade to design and implement a new STI strategy; section 5 reflects over such experience on topics related to the structure of incentives and the behavior of agents, the definition of leadership, the conditions to ensure the governance of the National System of Innovation (NSI) and the construction of consensus between agents. Section 6 contains final reflections.
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ItemInnovation capabilities accumulation using a lifecycle approach: The case of a Mexican steel company(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-09) Atoche-Kong, Carlos ; Dutrénit, GabrielaHow are innovation capabilities created in a firm in an emerging economy, why does such a firm decide to start to innovate? These are two of the challenging questions that direct this study. A Mexican steel company, called "Steel Company", is the subject of study. This company started to operate with obsolete equipment, and thanks to a strong management commitment to innovation, it could develop its own processing technology becoming the world technological leader in its market. This study uses a single case study research design in order to start the academic discussion regarding both questions. Capabilities life-cycles are identified, with a cluster of strategic capabilities evolving in a synergetic way, accumulating and diminishing innovation capabilities along the firm history. Strong context effects, shareholder and management support, and corporate strategy changes are among key factors that conducted this evolutionary process. The need to consider spin outs from the firm when studying the dynamics of capabilities is identified as an interesting future research for regional development purposes, as innovation capabilities can be transferred crossing the boundaries of the firm.