Local Ideas, Global Capital and the State: An Exploratory Research About the Start-Up Brasil Program

Abstract

This paper discusses the institutional arrangement of a new policy created in 2012 by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MSTI) to foster entrepreneurship and innovation: the “Start-Up Brasil” (SUB) program. The policy tries to bring together private firms focused on business assistance and on venture capital (accelerators) and small firms of the information technology field that lack finance and business expertise (start-ups). Based on the functional and descriptive analyzes of the SUB, I discuss how this policy differs from other state actions described by the literature in Brazil and creates incentives for the private sector through the coordination of different public institutions. I also analyze why the policy has one “Chief Operating Officer” and how this is connected to debates on post-Weberian bureaucracies and governance models of public management. In the final part of the paper I identify new questions for further research regarding the democratic control of the policy, the inequalities between accelerators and start-ups and the long-term impacts of this type of public support.