Os determinantes da interação universidade-empresa e o desenvolvimento tecnológico das empresas

Abstract

The academy-industry interaction has been presented as an important mechanism for firms, regions and countries technological development. Aiming to contribute to the understanding and clarification of the academy-industry interaction characteristics and its relation with the technological performance of Brazilian firms, this study attempts to identify whether the determinants of academy-industry interaction and the types of interactions influence on the relative performance to the technological innovation in products and processes of firms, besides verifying whether these features are distinct for the firms located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. From the presentation of the central concepts or the study, the description of the Brazilian innovation system and the structure of the innovation system of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, using a database consisting exclusively of firms that have developed interaction with universities or research institutes, the analysis were done using descriptive statistics, logistic regression and means and variances tests. It was confirmed the hypothesis that the type of academy-industry interaction is correlated with the technological performance related to the innovation in products and processes of Brazilian firms. The evidences indicate that firms that assign more importance to the interaction techniques that use technical information as information sources are less likely to introduce new products to the local market. In turn, those who assign greater importance to interactions with information about patents present higher probabilities of introducing new products and processes for the world market. On the other hand, the evidences also indicate that interactions aiming to access physical resources of the university or research institute do not increase the likelihood probability of innovation in products and processes. The results also indicate that the reasons for the firms to establish an interaction with universities or research institutes have no significant relation with the firms results in relation to the introduction of innovative products or processes. The study also indicated that the interaction determinants: firm size, the R&D intensity, and the industry have some association with their technological performance, whereas public funding did not show a significant relationship. As for firms located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the study indicates that these behave like the rest of the country, since there were no significant differences in mean and variance, it was only found that in the RS the firms have significantly higher mean of introduction of processes innovations to the local market, however it has no direct connection with the academy-industry interactions. The paper presents as a contribution to the topic understudy, an alternative to the use of the information relating to R&D expenditure as a proxy for the R&D intensity, proposing a new one consisted by the number of R&D employees, existence of continuous R&D activity or not and existence of R&D department in the firm. Another contribution is the propose of a taxonomy for the analysis of the academy-industry interactions types, consisting of three types: interactions with the use of technical information, interaction with the use of physical resources of the university or research institute, and interaction with the use of information about patents.