How Brazilian industries innovate

Abstract

The survival of industries in the market involves constantly searching for means to face the challenges of overcoming competitors, retaining current customers and acquiring new ones, optimizing resources, and acting strategically. It is known that to achieve these purposes, they must incentivize innovation by collaborating with external agents such as knowledge institutions, public Institutions for innovation support, startups, and even traditional competitors. This approach, referred to as open innovation, occurs more intensely in industries present in developed countries. In Brazil, open innovation is primarily used by large national or foreign companies, and businesses and public institutions make efforts to disseminate the innovation culture. This work examines how small and large Brazilian industries have been investing in research and development, how they are structured to carry out these processes, and what entrepreneurs have perceived concerning the benefits and difficulties of innovating. To this end, this study evaluated the data from the last three editions of the Survey of Innovation (PINTEC), elaborated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). It could be concluded that Brazil needs to make additional efforts to build an effective environment for innovative industries. Brazilian companies remain concerned with short-term survival; most internal efforts are to develop new products, have low interaction with universities, have little knowledge of innovation support mechanisms, and, in general, are highly susceptible to external economic factors.