Sources of technological opportunity in Brazil

Presented at the GLOBELICS 6th International Conference 2008 22-24 September, Mexico City, Mexico.This paper aims to assess the relevance of different sources of TO for Brazilian industries and to compare the results with those obtained in science-frontier countries. The paper uses micro level data from PINTEC (2003). The paper covers two different sources of TO: extra-mural sources of knowledge and technological trajectories and compare them with sectoral R&D intensity, sectoral rate of innovation (innovative output) and a input-output measure of TO, that is, of the probability of an innovative effort transforming into an innovation. The paper concludes that: (i) the knowledge used by Brazilian industry is highly production intensive. Very few sectors give relevance to sources of knowledge outside industry. Technological trajectories patterns are also different from scientific frontier countries; (ii) the distinguishing factors in terms of innovative strategy and performance are different. They refer, on the supply side, to sources of information outside Brazil, that is, most innovative industries require international sources of information and do not use Brazilian scientific and technology institutions. On the demand side, behavior is framed by market regulation institutions that require the use of productive standards. Therefore, most innovative industries make use of certification agencies to attend to market regulation standards, that is, innovation in Brazil is not associated with technological breakthroughs but it is related to following quality patterns; (iii) this pattern of distinguishing sectors is quite different from leading countries' results whose distinguishing features are proximity to science and the use of higher education and research labs