Internal barriers to innovation and university-industry cooperation among technology-based SMEs in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the association between internal barriers to innovation and the propensity of technology-based SMEs to cooperate with universities and research institutes (URIs). We examine empirically two types of internal company barriers – financial and knowledge obstacles to innovation. The data source is the latest edition of the Brazilian Innovation Survey (PINTEC). We analyse the full sample of technology-based SMEs as well as the subsamples of high-tech manufacturing companies and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Financial obstacles are shown to be strongly related to the propensity of KIBS to collaborate with URIs. Knowledge obstacles are moderately related to the propensity of high-tech manufacturing SMEs to collaborate with URIs. We conclude that while URIs have other important roles in the techno-economic system, their perceived contribution to alleviating internal innovation barriers for technology-based SMEs may be less prominent than policy decision-makers in emerging economies may expect.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology-based SMEs
• university-industry cooperation
• internal barriers
• innovation survey
• PINTEC

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the DRUID Conference, Copenhagen, June 2018; we are grateful to the discussants for insightful remarks. We would also like to thank the two anonymous referees and the guest editors of this Journal for their helpful and detailed comments, as well as the IBGE for providing access to the microdata from PINTEC. The authors acknowledge support by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in connection to the São Paulo Excellence Chair in Innovation Systems, Strategy and Policy (InSySPo) established at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Diego de Moraes Silva and Luis Lucas acknowledge support of CAPES doctoral scholarships and the infrastructural support by UNICAMP’s Department of Science and Technology Policy. Nicholas Vonortas acknowledges the infrastructural support of the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at the George Washington University. He also acknowledges support from the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics within the framework of the subsidy to the HSE by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5–100ʹ. None of these organisations is responsible for the contents of this paper. Remaining mistakes and misconceptions are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Organisational barriers were included in earlier versions of this analysis. They were later omitted for statistical reasons. See Section 3.2.

² Data accessed at the MCTIC website (www.mctic.gov.br) on July 20th, 2018.

³ Following international practice, IBGE only publishes aggregate data to guarantee the secrecy of firms’ strategic information. In order to use PINTEC’s microdata, one needs to follow a formal access procedure involving the submission of a request to access and use the data onsite. Therefore, we do not own the database employed herein, and cannot make it available to other researchers.

⁴ Such syndrome typically involves the inclination of firms to mistrust and not incorporate external knowledge as it does not align with their perception of the technology and industry (Katz and Allen 1982).

⁵ Appendix Tables A1 and A2 include a group of organisational obstacles as well since, at first, we had considered including these barriers in the analysis. As it can be observed, however, consistency of these barriers was lacking, underlining the decision to omit them.