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Technological capability refers to knowledge-intensive skills and resources to change existing technologies or to create new ones. The accumulation of such capability by companies and industries has been part of governments' and businesses' agendas as it is vital for countries' industrial development and increase of per capita income. However, the various public innovation policies implemented in Brazil over the last few decades and the different studies and debates on their limited outcomes failed to address the accumulation of technological capabilities by companies and industries as one of the primary sources for the increase in the rate of innovation and the sustained growth of the economy. This article presents an analytical framework to contribute to the effectiveness of a national innovation strategy centred on the accumulation of technological capability at the level of companies and industries. This analytical framework can contribute to assessing the return on public innovation policies regarding the accumulation of technological capability to develop significant innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of innovation in complex systems industries is becoming an independent research stream. Apart from conventional uncertainties related to commerce and technology, complex-system industries must cope with systemic uncertainty. This paper's objective is to analyze evolving technological paths from one product generation to the next through two case studies in the Brazilian aerospace industry, considering systems integration as an empirical instantiation of dynamic capabilities. A proposed "coupled processes" model intertwines two organizational processes regarded as two levels of dynamic capabilities: new product and technological developments. The model addresses the role of emergent properties in shaping a firm's technological base. Moreover, it uses a technology readiness level to unveil systems integration business tricks and as a decision-making yardstick. The "coupled processes" model is revealed as a set of dynamic capabilities presenting ambidexterity in complex systems industries, a finding that may be relevant for newly industrialized economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the challenges derived from the discovery of huge oil reserves under the salt layer, called Pre-salt, poses to Brazilian economy and society. These challenges are technological, but also of economic and institutional nature. The article depicts what these challenges are, focusing on the recent developments in the Brazilian oil industry and analyses these evolutions under the light of debate about "curse of natural resources" and Dutch disease. The Brazilian situation reveals great potential advances in the technological and productive level, with a clear perspective that Brazil will become a great oil exporter. However based on evidences from Petrobras and the oil supply industry since the Pre-salt discoveries, alongside with the institutional evolution, the article points out the risks that the country reproduces some of the problems pointed out by international literature over the curse of natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil (1955-2005): 25 years of catching-up, 25 years of falling behind. The present paper discusses the Brazilian industrial development under a neo-schumpeterian perspective in the period after 1955. The hypothesis is that, in the last 50 years, Brazil spent the first 25 years catching up and, next, the following 25 years falling behind. The 1955-1980 period, by means of international funding, allowed catching up with the paradigm in maturation within the fourth technological revolution. However, in this period, it was determined the main debilitating elements for the country's entrance in the new techno-economical paradigm of the fifth technological revolution which emerged in the middle of the 70s. It is in the strategy to internationalize the economy, granting the mutinational companies the key-sectors of the national economy dynamics during the catching up period, the main element of dependence in the journey that conditions the current performance, responsible for technology subordination and keeps the Brazilian economy with low dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a country whose first university was not established until the 20th century, Brazil is not doing badly in science and technology. The author looks at the science and technology behind the country's growing repulation as an up-and-coming world superpower. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Brazil has what it takes to innovate technology at the highest level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Most of the studies that describe the building of innovation capability in emerging and developing economies have focused on the ways in which latecomer firms develop continuously towards advanced capability levels along existing technological trajectories, particularly for the assembled products industries, especially in Asia. A slightly different approach is adopted herein by focusing on pathways of discontinuous capability building of firms in natural resource-processing industries. By drawing on evidence from a variety of case studies taken from 13 forestry, pulp, and paper firms in Brazil in the period 1950–2007, it was found that: (1) in contrast with the majority of case studies reported in the literature, the pathways followed by firms in their accumulation of innovation capability involved a qualitative departure from the established technological trajectory at an early stage in the development of their capability; (2) the pathways of firms along the new technological trajectories were nevertheless characterised by a high degree of variability (from intermediate to world leading innovators) in terms of the levels and speeds of the accumulation of innovation capability; (3) firms that have attained progressively higher levels of innovative performance have more rapidly developed a combination of internal and external research-based arrangements in order to undertake increasingly complex, but firm-centred innovation efforts. This paper sheds some light on some of the discussions that relate to the role of natural resources in the patterns of industrial progress and growth in those countries endowed with particular natural resource-based industries. It also provides a methodological contribution to the study of the long-term innovation strategies that make use of the dynamics of capability building, especially within natural resource-processing industries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Este artículo analiza y compara los factores que condicionan la innovación en Argentina y Brasil, países que basan sus estrategias de industrialización en la sustitución de importaciones. Las regresiones probit en las que se utilizan variables instrumentales para controlar problemas de endogeneidad de las exportaciones, revelan que en ambos países los conocimientos externos a la empresa contribuyen a promover la innovación, que la capacidad interna de investigación y desarrollo es relativamente débil y que la inserción comercial externa tiene un efecto positivo sobre la tendencia a innovar, aunque más en Brasil que en Argentina. En general, los resultados de este estudio sugieren que en los últimos años ha habido un modesto avance en el patrón de innovación de las empresas argentinas y brasileñas con respecto al período de sustitución de importaciones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]