Are Brazilian innovation systems innovative? Regional and sectorial decompositions of triple-helix synergies

Abstract

A knowledge-based economy adds innovation as another dynamic to a political economy. Whereas a political economy is institutionalized -for example, in a nation state- the knowledge base is volatile although it leaves footprints behind by transforming the institutional layers. This transformation into new options can be measured as redundancy using the Triple-Helix indicator. The balance between historical entropy generation and the knowledge-based generation of options can be measured in terms of positive and negative contributions to the prevailing uncertainty. At what scale and in which sectors is synergy among geographical, technological, and organizational distributions of firms evident? Using mutual information in the three dimensions as an indicator, we analyse a dataset of more than 16 million firms in Brazil and compute synergy within and across states and sectors in this country in terms of bits of information. The results suggest that no synergy is generated at the national level. The political economy of the country has not (yet) been transformed into a national innovation system. At state level, synergies vary according to geographical levels and sectors due to the specifics of the states. Above-average values were found for some states in the South and Southeast Regions. Also, the political capital, Brasilia, has resulted to have no impact in the innovation system of Brazil.