ABSTRACT
Innovation policies have increasingly been part of the economic agenda of developed and developing countries, particularly through programs focused on small businesses. The objective of this paper is to analyze the scope and effectiveness of innovation policies in Brazil, with an emphasis on new tools to foster small business innovation. Analyzing Brazilian public policies focused on fostering innovation in small businesses, this paper presents, with a pioneering feature, the profile of firms that have access to public resources. It will also present the indicators of innovative effort and performance for those that benefited or not from public program resources, as well as considering a sectoral analysis. The empirical analysis is based on data from the last three issues of the Pesquisa de Inovação Tecnológica (Pintec 2003, 2005 and 2008), with the use of a tabulation developed by IBGE especially for this paper. The results suggest that the public support for the innovative activities of small businesses is growing in terms of the magnitude of the available resources as well as the diversification of instruments used, promoting improvements regarding the innovative efforts of this representative segment of Brazilian firms.
Keywords:
Innovation policy; Small businesses; Brazilian industry; Pintec; Brazil
