Redes cooperativas de pesquisa no Brasil: uma análise espacial e regional dos Sistemas Territoriais de Inovação

Abstract

This work is structured around three main axes. The first explores the relationship between history, politics, development, and the emergence of new technologies and products within a context of transformation in development and accumulation modes. It is argued that the Information and Knowledge Economy (IKE), while not a standalone explanation, is fundamental to understanding the functioning of the capitalist system, especially from the 1980s onward. The IKE and its proponents, the evolutionary economists, offer revealing perspectives on the institutional and cognitive aspects underlying development and underdevelopment in the contemporary world, introducing essential concepts such as National Innovation Systems (NIS) and, in a multiscalar approach, Territorial Innovation Systems (TIS). The second axis addresses economic activities through their geographic expression, investigating where they are located, how they interact with the territory, how they regionalize, and in what scales they reproduce, while also considering issues of balance and inequality. Although these discussions are not exclusive to evolutionary economics, they remain central to Economic Geography. Recent studies on innovation and space have gained prominence due to their relevance to regional development, incorporating perspectives from systemic evolutionary theories. These studies emphasize the importance of building public and private institutions aimed at financing and mitigating risks in research activities conducted both within and outside firms. They also highlight the strengthening of universities and their connections to the productive fabric, the balance between collaboration and competition among economic agents, and the crucial role of interaction and tacit knowledge transmission within the territory—factors that drive radical innovations and generate positive externalities. These two axes converge in the research object: Cooperative Research Networks (CRN), which represent the interaction between university, productive, and governmental systems. Thus, the main objective is to conduct a comprehensive spatial and regional analysis of CRN and their effects on Territorial Innovation Systems in Brazil. The analysis considers both the Brazilian NIS and Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) at the Immediate Region (IR) scale. It is argued that the development and maturation of TIS depend on a balanced relationship between university-economy interaction (UEI) and the production of science, technology, and innovation (STI). The third axis encompasses the empirical exercises and methods employed to achieve the study's objectives. To this end, a regionalized database was constructed, encompassing both the CRN and the STI assets of the IRs. Based on this dataset and the literature, qualitative and quantitative methods are applied, along with graphical representations. The results indicate that CRN extend beyond simple connections between research groups (universities) and economic partners, encompassing knowledge flows within the territory, the institutional capacity of Brazil's public and private systems to absorb and generate new knowledge, and the historical trajectories of regions. It is concluded that innovative products are strongly interdependent on CRN, with positive feedback effects, yet are also marked by regional inequalities rooted in the historical evolution of political economy.