Porte da Firma e Inovação: Uma análise sobre Sistemas Nacionais de Inovação e Determinantes do Resultado Inovativo para Brasil e Países Europeus

Abstract

Technical change and the innovation’s development are fundamental forces to explain the dynamics of capitalist economies and this process must be understood in a systematic approach and studied in its particularities. It must be highlighted how the firms’ characteristics, like size, can influence their innovative efforts in terms of strategies, activities and, consequently, their results. In this sense, this work’s aim to investigate the relationship between company size and innovation, considering the aspects of the innovation systems where they are placed. Therefore, the work has the hypothesis that there is an important difference in terms of strategies, efforts and innovative output due to the characteristics of small, medium and large companies at national level. In order to explore the relationship between the business size and the innovative process, data from European Countries and Brazil were gathered, at national level, from the innovation surveys of Community Innovation Survey and Pesquisa de Inovação Tecnológica, which allowed the comparison between different countries first using cluster analysis, in an attempt to classify them, also accordingly with their innovative efficiency. In addition, an exercise was also carried out to identify which factors linked to business strategies and national innovation systems may be more important for the innovative output, comparing small, medium and large companies using panel data methods. The results suggest that there is an important difference in terms of effort and innovative output between each size, with small and medium-sized companies having a lower innovative output than large ones, but on the other hand, being more efficient in terms of the effort undertaken. Also, was found out that innovation systems that produce the best innovative output are not always the most efficient. Other findings indicate that there are differences in strategies linked to innovative output by size. While cooperation with universities seems to be more important for small companies, for the large ones, cooperation with enterprises of the same group is more influential. There are also differences in the relationship between the variables of the national innovation systems and the innovative output, as for large companies receiving intellectual property rights is more important, while for small and medium-sized firms access to domestic credit is more important. In general, the work suggests the need to consider different indicators to measure innovative trajectories, efforts and results, in addition to the efficiency of this effort, which can be useful to capture the differences in the innovative process between different firms’ sizes and in countries with different innovation systems. It is also suggested that public policies facilitate the expansion of access to credit to obtain a positive effect on innovation for small and medium-sized companies, which can reduce their innovative gap with large companies. Seeking to attract foreign direct investment, which positively affects small and large companies can also be an important strategy to be considered by policy makers.