Editorial

EDITORIAL

Innovation – new processes, products and services or, alternatively, knowledge taken to the market or social practice – constitutes now a key policy both in developed and emergent countries. Economic results partially explain this success: according to OECD, innovative activities contribute about 50 fifty percent of GN yet P growth in developed countries. But the impact of innovation goes far beyond. Enterprises play a specific role in the process, but innovation is carried out by society as a whole, mobilizes research and teaching institutions and financial agents, depends on regulatory frame, and is sensitive to public opinion and the citizen behavior. It is indeed a huge cultural process, promoting all levels of education, strengthening the value of research, generating new organizational models and new work patterns. It is a total social fact, according to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

Innovation's evolution trends are also clearly visible. They imply an increasing density of science components, coupled with tacit knowledge, experience, skills and management to create, produce, improve and commercialize goods and services. Vision of future and foresight exercises become essential features. The strategic locus of knowledge places the educational and research system in a central position as talent provider, new knowledge source and mediator in external knowledge adaptation and absorption. The increasing complexity fosters cooperative behavior, promotes strategic alliances and prods multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary networking. It intensifies dialogue between the science and technology educational environment, production sectors and multiple society segments. It allows growing importance to articulation at national, regional and local levels. And international dimension takes up a crucial role.

Brazil's position is peculiar in this context. On one hand the country meets widely known difficulties and drawbacks. On the other hand we see a steadily growing amount of successful initiatives and striking results. Albeit insufficient yet they constitute nonetheless an expressive basis and provide strong assets for a positive transformation. On the science capability issue significant advances are now generally acknowledged, both in research training and on the overall amount and quality of research outcome. What is somehow less recognized is the decisive fact that Brazil scientific capacity profile recently reached the characteristic outline found in more developed countries. Research distribution over the full range of disciplines follows now the pattern established by the leading S&T producers. Such a basis has considerable value mainly if we take into account technology convergence requirements and the need to compose different kinds of expertise to cope with complex research programs.

It is also about time to overcome commonplace misconceptions about innovation capacity in Brazilian industry. It is true that former attitude, within the logic of imports substitution, consisted mostly in the building up of manufacturing units and mastering known technology. Innovation had little place in that kind of approach. But is also true that this is no more a realistic image of what is going on. We are, of course, still far from a prevailing innovative posture in Brazilian entrepreneurial tissue. But recent studies like the one delivered by IPEA ["Innovation, technology patterns and performance of Brazilian industrial firms", 2005] display a more complex and promising reality. To single out just one feature, only 1.7 percent of Brazilian industries have reached an innovative level that allows them to successfully compete all over the world. But they already represent 25 percent of Brazil industrial GNP. And some 180 firms among them attained world leadership in their field. We are not bound anymore to a few traditional cases – like agribusiness, bioethanol, Petrobras, Embraer, WEG or Bematech – to exemplify successful innovative initiatives in the country. Even if slowly our capacity to innovate is steadily spreading and already points out some tracks to a more consistent presence.

Those factors, associated to the strengthening of industrial policy and the effort to devise more efficient instruments, as the Innovation Law and the new mechanisms to foster and fund industrial R&D, may signify the dawning of a new innovation environment in Brazil. Chemistry, due to the remarkable growth of its S&T basis and productivity, as well as its pervasive presence in many industrial domains and its constitutive role in novel fields like nanotechnology and biotechnology, is invited to play a relevant part in this scenario. Innovation and creativity are no longer optional, but the key the evolution of enterprises and development of the country. But entrance to the new state of affairs demands the realization that we have now a new set of possibilities and that this positive transformation is indeed within our reach. Under these conditions we can effectively build up the necessary strategies to fully access the culture of our time.

Evando Mirra de Paula e Silva

(Director of ABDI – Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development)

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  29 Jan 2007
• Date of issue
  Dec 2006