Capabilities and Innovation Trajectories of Brazilian Companies

Abstract

All types of businesses need and can afford to innovate? How the process of innovation does happen? What are the characteristics necessary to innovate? Do industry and technological level influence innovation? To answer these questions, one must consider innovation as not simply the creation of something new, but rather as an initiative to change in order to fill some market gap, and to obtain results from it. It is possible to say that all companies will always consist of four basic functions, in a greater or lesser degree - development, operations, management and marketing. Innovation, therefore, emerges from one of these functions and, for each function; there is a correspondent innovation capability. The objective of this article is to identify the innovation capabilities of manufacturing Brazilian companies, and, with this present their innovation trajectories. To achieve the proposed objective, we used a database of 1326 manufacturing companies from Rio Grande do Sul. The project was developed in three phases: (i) development of a theoretical model of the firm's innovation capability; (ii) exploratory phase and; (iii) data collection (survey) with companies of different industries in Rio Grande do Sul. Considering the sample main characteristics, we present a typical Brazilian firm: it is merely provider of industrial services, with low potential for innovation. Wheter by cluster activity, in majority low or medium-low technological intensity, wheter by your family management model that is focused in reducing costs and your innovation trajectory is restricted to maintain a quality control and to maximize production.