Abstract
This paper is based on the information collected through a survey on technological innovation in a relatively large sample of 1000 firms of the Brazilian Food Industry (hereafter BFI). 248 firms (24.8%) responded to the questionnaire and 77 (31.0%) declared that they had introduced innovations in the period surveyed (1994–1996). This paper concentrates both on the different characteristics related to food firms and innovative activity and on the nature of the innovations. Regarding the former we have asked questions about firms' industrial sector, major activities, production stages, ownership, age, turnover, exports effort, advertising, R&D and technological innovation effort, size (number of employees), external alliances, organization of management functions (technological innovation policy, long term strategic plan, marketing research), and perceived barriers to innovation. Regarding the nature of the innovations, questions included: institutional sources of knowledge of the innovations, sources of innovations (external or internal), degree of protection of innovations (patents and other means), external collaboration, novelty of innovations (radical or incremental), type of innovations (product, process or combined), newness of innovations (to the world, to the country or to the firm), and impact of innovations on inputs (manpower, material, capital and energy). The results of the research are presented in this paper in a descriptive way. Therefore, we have not carried out advanced statistical analysis and we have not tried to establish cause-effect relationships among variables, but just links among them and trends. From the analysis, we can claim that technological innovation is actually a very complex process within firms, even though they are in a so called “low-tech” industry. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify outstanding factors linked to this process both at industry level (some sectors are more innovative than others) and at firm level (the large firms tend to be more innovative than small ones).
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