Revista Administración Pública y Sociedad (Dec 2017)
Diffusion of innovations on the brazilian national ST&I strategy
Abstract
This paper aims to analyze the most recent document of the Brazilian National Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy (ENCTI) in order to identify guidelines related to the diffusion of innovations in the national economy. We argue that government institutions can adopt policies that explicitly promote diffusion, among which the promotion of a technical support system can be decisive for innovations to propagate more widely in the economy. From the review of the theoretical literature on diffusion, in which the perspective of information diffusion and the evolutionary perspective were considered, the meaning of government intervention was presented, as well as the role of the institutions in the promotion of diffusion. In the assessment of the official ENCTI document, in general, we note that topics explicitly related to diffusion have been neglected in the ST&I policy agenda. However, by interpreting diffusion as a broad process, as introduced by the evolutionary perspective, policy for diffusion can be identified in conjunction with that of innovation. The main guidelines of ENCTI that indirectly affect diffusion are those focused on the creation of technical capacities for the autonomous development of innovations, such as the promotion of R&D and training of human resources. The guidelines that can be interpreted with a direct approach to diffusion are related to the strengthening of the institutions related to the network of technical support to the companies, like the technological extension.
